Imtiaz Dharker’s eighth poetry collection, published in May 2024, invites the reader to accompany one woman on a personal journey. It begins in a confrontation with the titular Shadow Reader and moves restlessly to the final point at which their unwelcome prophecy must be realised or resisted:
He licked his finger, flicked a page
and told me the year of my death.
That year has arrived.
(p. 11)
The figure of the ‘Shadow Reader’ recurs intermittently, interrupting the onward momentum of the poems which prove striking as individual texts yet remain woven together by the repetitions and echoes they feature.
But I didn’t believe a word he said.
The Shadow Reader predicted
the year of my death, not how or where.
I shrugged and put it out of my head
(p. 151)
Navigating the noisiness and simultaneity of the world today, Dharker rejects the path of least resistance, challenging fate and crossing various terrains of violence, hostility and displacement on her pilgrimage, a journey which ultimately seeks to reaffirm the persistence of empathy and humanity within the encounters depicted.
In this vein, connection and community triumph: ‘This wasn’t our fight. But a fight is a fight / and we stand shoulder to shoulder’ (pp. 27–28) Faced with the prospect of her mortality, Dharker revisits the stories of those whose voices have been suppressed or erased: ‘For the Girl whose hair escaped’, the ‘Woman Who Will Bring Biryani Next Time’, the ‘Woman Who Changed Back Into a Snake’. She comments on the difficulties of finding and holding onto ideas of ‘home’ and identity, and the associated rules and conditions which often impede social acceptance. In ‘Where you belong’, Dharker highlights the cruelty of these moving goalposts, whilst ‘What it grows into’ concentrates on the insults that give way to bigger injury, the micro-aggressions that, left to germinate, grow into widespread systemic oppression. In ‘Back’, the enduring significance of Dharker’s own home, Glasgow, is returned to: regardless of its issues and divisions, the city remains a safe place for the poet, ‘the place that will always have your back’ (p. 56). Yet, whilst Dharker conveys a familiarity with the struggles of finding your place in the world, she doesn’t suggest herself to be innocent: in ‘For the Minicab Driver Who Looked as if He Needed Feeding’, the poem is written not from the perspective of the person who experiences hostility but the one who perpetuates it:
Before I can stop them, the words
fall out of my mouth, And where
are you from… I mean,
your people?
(p. 66)
Her commentary and conjecture is balanced, unafraid to apologise for wrongdoing as well as condemn it. Dharker repeatedly challenges the authority of the storyteller over their subject, herself included, and pays homage to culture as a confluence of voices, narratives and languages. The black and white contrast of the poet’s illustrations complement the nuance of her poems, in which the many shades of grey live. This is most evident in the poems which specifically accompany an artwork, redressing the hierarchies that recreates: ekphrasis as reparation. In ‘The Show’, for instance, Dharker focuses on the ayah, the young Indian girl depicted in Johann Zoffany’s 1786 painting ‘Colonel Blair and his Family and an Indian Ayah’: ‘Not an ayah, you want to say, a child’ (p. 23). Humanising her, she evolves from a shadowy figure into an individual with a significant role, voice and story. Circling back then, as Dharker does so fluidly, in ‘Did anyone say what happened to the girl?’, the scene is modernised as an image is viewed on a smart phone rather than in a gallery, yet the hierarchy depicted remains: ‘She is still the ayah, only the masters / are new’ (p. 29). A sense of disillusion gathers as the reader progresses through Dharker’s poems, registering these repetitions of history in which inequality remains the constant. Yet all hope is not lost: the recurring symbolism of weaving indicates the enduring possibility of creating something new out of these repetitions. In ‘Loom’, ‘The Weaver Makes a Pitch’ and ‘The Weaver Makes a Spell’, the practice of artistic creation is both an act of magic and resistance: ‘They are weaving the world and everything / that lives in it’ (p. 31).
Dharker’s grouping of poems here, and throughout the collection, ensures that images and ideas not only recur sporadically but are assembled alongside one another in pockets of familiarity that the reader moves between. Her three poems ‘Seen from a drone’, set in Delhi, Mumbai and a third unspecified location, insert distance between writer and subject, dividing the one who watches from those who are seen. In her seven ‘Night Walk’ poems, the reader is led from one text into the next as though through neighbouring districts of a city, the rhythm of their walking consistent and reliable amidst the unpredictability of the diverse contexts encountered. Towards the end of the volume, Dharker introduces a series of poems that satirise the impact of social media upon society’s increased need for validation and diminished empathy, as technology that claims to strengthen interpersonal connection fails to do so in any meaningful sense. These poems – from ‘Writing the Will’ to ‘She Contemplates Her Death’ – poke fun at the superficial nature of photoshop, parasocial interactions and technological consumerism, balancing the seriousness of her social commentary elsewhere with comic relief, a welcome precursor to the final, definitive intervention of the Shadow Reader.
Ultimately, the encounters and interactions experienced throughout the collection culminate in the outright rejection of the Shadow Reader’s prophecy: ‘If I can hear the iamb of my heart I’m not dead / yet. My walk is a sonnet’ (p. 156). Humanity and life prevail and, apparently against the odds, Dharker’s collection shines a light upon the shadows that encroach from all directions, illustrating a powerful example of the individual’s agency to reclaim their narrative and voice, to forge their own identity, and to curate their own home and future.
This is the embrace
that can heal and hold you safe.
Stranger, welcome home.
(p. 147)Shadow Reader is published by Bloodaxe Books
