Shadow Reader
By Imtiaz Dharker
Bloodaxe Books (Hexham UK)
ISBN:978-1-78037-709-4
158pp.

Imtiaz Dharker is a leading British poet, the recipient of many awards and the only writer of South Asian origin to receive the prestigious Queen’s Medal for Poetry. She is also a filmmaker and an accomplished artist. All her eight poetry collections, including the recent Shadow Reader, are elegantly illustrated by her, with spare black and white prints. These drawings add to the rich visual quality of her verse.

Shadow Reader is an intricate, multi-layered collection encompassing the spoken and unspoken, the seen and unseen, across cultures and continents. The whole is impelled by Dharker’s memory of the prediction in Mumbai by a Shadow Reader, an astrologer. The first poem ‘In the Year of my Death’ consists of six lines: “When I was twenty-five/ the Shadow Reader said/ I would live to a ripe old age./ He licked his finger, flicked a page/ and told me the year of my death./ That year has arrived.”

The next two poems, ‘Out of the Rose Garden’ and ‘Our Story’, with vivid images of nature and art, move across illusion, reality, storytelling and an illuminated manuscript in which time-damaged marks indicate alternative truths. Here the rhythmic inclusion of the Urdu words “attar” (without italics) in the former, and the italicised “hidayat” in the latter, symbolise the movement of languages, people and stories across continents.

This in turn challenges the ahistorical narratives of East vs West; it also encompasses Dharker’s multi-layered British identity: she was born in Lahore, grew up in Scotland, married an Indian and lived in Mumbai, then settled in London and married a Welshman, who passed away in 2009.

The latest poetry collection from a leading British poet of Pakistani origin contemplates the veracity and interpretation of words and images, life and after-life, and widespread concepts of the alien Other

Dharker’s poems are often complex, symbolic reflections of the very term “shadow reader”, contemplating words and images, their veracity and interpretation, past and present and widespread concepts of the alien Other. In ‘The Map of This Country is Made of Destruction’, she contrasts the narrative elisions of today’s all-powerful nations with the suffering of a hapless people in a land, bombarded with missiles.

‘The Show’ looks at Zoffany’s 1786 painting ‘Colonial Blair and his family and an Indian Ayah’; it begins with the protest “Not an ayah you want to say, a child”; the painter’s focus on the English couple and their daughters gives them “a noble version of themselves to take back home/ and hang above a marble fireplace” in Perthshire.

“They think of themselves as kindly/ masters” tolerating the “extra” girl — the ayah — in her tattered clothes; in the background are Indian landscapes depicting an elephant and savage customs: “a widow on her way to a funeral pyre.”

Dharker employs imagery to advantage in interpreting changing fortunes and changing times, depicted in arts, crafts and/or literature. “Boy with a Turban” captures Queen Victoria’s sketch of her protege, the exiled 16-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh kneeling by, and tying a turban on the head of, her son, Prince Arthur; ‘Letters Home’ queries the word “enemy” in its contemplation of Indian soldiers who were employed in Europe during the two World Wars, but continued to be marginalised by their colonial rulers.

At the same time, Dharker’s poems often move across time and to contemporary realities. In ‘Did anyone say what happened to the girl?’, a quiet reference to modern technology, forwards the narrative of social iniquity, beyond colonialism and race, to the present day with the words: “She is still the ayah, only the masters/ are new.”

In ‘Loom’ the metaphoric portrayal of weavers and their craft, spins an interconnected world, its natural life, strife, suffering, innocence and hope; ‘The Weaver Tells the Spell’ focuses on warding off a curse and the evil eye. She goes on to engage with legend and lore and the surreal in ‘Demons Rule’ and the feminist ‘What Goes of Your Father?’ which draws on the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana while ‘Fly’ captures an insect’s view of a post-battle victory portrayed in the Persian Padshah-nama.

In the title poem, the poet recalls being unwillingly led up pistachio-coloured stairs, cluttered by collapsed wires to meet the ‘Shadow Reader’ and have her fortune told: she longs “to turn around/ and walk away down Chowpatty beach.” Another poem, ‘The Shadow Reader is Measuring’, describes the astrologer assessing her shadow: “He pulls out a notched ruler and mumbles/ numbers on to a tattered square line jotter/ adds, subtracts, reaches up behind his head/ without looking back, pulls out a scroll and/reads.”

In the poem ‘Say No’, she writes: “Even at twenty five/ I could do without astrologers/ telling me what I should not do./ But that was before I learnt the art/ of saying No.”

Dharker’s continues to query the “ownership” of truth in several poems exploring migration, identity and belonging in contemporary Britain, including ‘Back’ which is written in the second person and where remarks by strangers “to go back where you came from” or “You don’t belong here”, are juxtaposed against the migrant’s assertion of Glasgow as home since childhood and reinforced by the inclusion of Scottish terminology.

Other poems offer more welcoming spaces, where new discoveries are to be made: ‘The Key’ captures the enchantment of a room filled with books, which open out new worlds; while ‘Reader’ consists of four lines: “You come to the books/ to take you away, but they open/ to welcome you home/ and you stay.”

The collection continues to pass through different experiences and memories; some mention specific areas in Scotland or London; some continue to seamlessly weave in Urdu words. ‘For the Woman Who Will Bring Biryani Next Time’ in a British hospital, a young doctor diagnoses an elderly South Asian woman with a liver problem, but his examination reminds her of her mother’s touch; her mother “would say liver/ kaleja, the place where my love lives/ You are my kaleja.”

A particularly powerful and moving poem, ‘Na Jaa’, employs the imagery of boat and boatman to convey the transition of a dying man from this world to the next, with each verse alternating with the plea “Na Jaa” and “Don’t Go.”

Life and after-life are integral to several verses as are hope, disappointments and dreams. Three poems conjure up the narrator’s aspirations and imaginary representations of Philip Larkin, William Blake and Faiz Ahmed Faiz respectively. A sequence of seven poems, ranging from ‘Night Walk with Ghosts, Smithfield’ and ‘Night Walk by the Canal’ to ‘Night Walk with Lit Windows’ and ‘Night Walk with Blackbird’, move beyond stereotyped concepts of darkness to engage with history, time, existence and nature.

Perceptions of the world, with the advent of modern technology, computers, video and social media, include aerial photographs in ‘Seen from a Drone, Delhi’ and ‘Seen from a Drone, Mumbai’ — a future with devices that the Shadow Reader could not have imagined.

The final poems include ‘Your Session has Been Terminated’, which tells of the Shadow Reader again.“He took my shadow like an unstitched/ length of cloth/ washed the stories out and hung the rest/ to dry.” Her refusal to believe his predictions emerges in ‘But the Radiance’, although, decades later, in the year she was supposed to die, images of him come back to her vividly.

Ultimately, in the very last poem, ‘I Walk in the Shadow’, she defies him with a song of joy. “My walk is iambic. I keep the beat./ Shall I compare thee to tadum tadum?” She celebrates life and living and adds, “If I can hear the iamb of my heart, I am not dead/ yet. My walk is a sonnet/ My walk is Ma Sha Allah” — and her final words dismiss the Shadow Reader for ever.

This is a remarkable collection, which adds to the significance of Dharker’s oeuvre and its contribution to contemporary English poetry.

The reviewer is the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 22nd, 2024