PURDAH (1)
One day they said
she was old enough to learn some shame.
She found it came quite naturally.
Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put dead men in.
People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.
She half-remembers things
from someone else’s life,
perhaps from yours, or mine –
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs a sense of sin.
We sit still, letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies’ walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoing in the places we have just left.
She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes, she is always
inching past herself,
as if she were a clod of earth
and the roots as well,
scratching for a hold
between the first and second rib.
Passing constantly out of her own hands,
into the corner of someone else’s eyes . . .
while the doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.
Purdah, 1 is the lead poem in Imtiaz Dharker’s collection by the same name. Its seven irregular stanzas in free verse imply something like a spiritual biography by virtue of the sequence of moments each stanza captures.
The first stanza is only three lines long and marks the moment that elders decide a girl must wear the veil:
“One day they said / she was old enough to learn some shame. / She found it came quite naturally.”
The second stanza seems to shift the focalization to that of the girl, who finds “a kind of safety” and “a place to hide” behind the cloth she is compelled to wear, but also compares this attire to “the earth that falls / on coffins. . . .”
The second and third stanzas testify—in the third person—about the different ways that people look to her and that she feels about her body, now that she wears the veil, and this estranging outlook intimates the initial stages of a dissociated sensibility.
The fourth stanza (which begins “We sit still, letting the cloth grow / a little closer to our skin.”) ends with the evocative lines “Voices speak inside us, / echoing in the spaces we have just left.” The first-person-plural voice that we hear in this stanza is paradoxically that of suppressed, unvoiced thoughts, but thoughts shared, even so, by the women in purdah.
The final two stanzas are voiced, once again, in the third person—but now they reveal the beginning of the girl’s mental breakdown or revolt (“She stands outside herself, / sometimes in all four corners of a room”), followed by a consciousness of her spirit spiraling ever “inward and again / inward.”
The back-and-forth motion between points of view that characterizes this poem blurs the border between the social self and the private self and emphasizes the dislocation of spirit that comes from seeing the image of one’s veiled self all around oneself, so that “Wherever she goes, she is always / inching past herself” (stanza 6).
The poem’s ambiguities and paradoxical images of light and burial tease us serially into identification, sympathy, horror, and a kaleidoscope of related thoughts on the similarities between purdah and other forms of uniform socialization.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature
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