Recently, there has been much excitement over new writers of Pakistani English fiction, but very little has been written about Pakistani English poetry, although in the past year, the poems of Pakistan-born Moniza Alvi have appeared in three major volumes her sixth volume of poetry titled Europa; a collection of her previous five volumes titled Split World Poems 1990-2000; and an anthology titled Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions Elizabeth Alexander, Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker and Jackie Kay (edited by Neil Astley).
Europa, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and short-listed for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize, is a truly spectacular collection which reflects Alvi's preoccupation with the many dimensions of war, conquest and violence and focuses in particular on women as victims. The collection is divided into three sections.
The first consists of a skilled sequence of poems which deal with the complex fragmentation of memory and mind to cope with the unacceptable. The first poem 'Post Traumatic Stress syndrome' begins
Not now, said the mind to the brain
Not yet.
And it cloaked itself in amnesia
And time curled up serpent-like
In dusty mosaics
cemented together.
She provides a haunting unravelling of the subconscious in the poems which follow, such as 'Symptoms', 'Memory, Memory' 'Key Words' and 'Sleeping Wounds'. Alvi clever use of veiled innuendoes, inchoate images and colours — red, vermilion and crimson — portray unseen wounds.
The whole is underpinned by the poem 'Mermaid', dedicated to artist Tabitha Ververs whose painting 'When We Talk of Rape' (which is reproduced on the book's cover) portrays a dying mermaid with her tail split into two, around which Alvi recreates her narrative of seduction, lust, treachery and rape.
What Ververs and Alvi provide is a feminist reinterpretation of the popular fairytale 'The Little Mermaid' by Hans Christian Andersen, which tells of a mermaid who was persuaded by a faithless prince to give up her tail for a pair of legs to earn his love.
Deception and illusion is central to Europa. Alvi challenges another patriarchal legend in the volume's second and central sequence, a long narrative poem entitled 'Europa and the Bull'.
Here she engages, expands and reinterprets the patriarchal Roman myth of Europa, the King of Phoenicia's daughter, who was abducted across the seas to Crete by the god Jupiter while he was disguised as a white bull.
The geographical location is particularly interesting because Europa gave the continent of Europe its name and Phoenicia is today's Lebanon and the Middle East. The poem therefore makes a comment on the intertwined histories of nations, East and West, and questions the heroic epics of power, dominance and conquest.
In a wonderful lyrical sequence, marked by the lightness and elegance that is integral to her poetry, Alvi's weaves in the shades of white to describe the playful bull and Europa's enchantment with him on the shores of her
father's kingdom.
Climb onto his back
The air seemed to say.
Cling to his broad white neck
he bowed low beckoning her
with half-knowing looks,
and she clambered on the milky hill of him,
until they were one,
Europa and the bull, motionless
for an instant, answerable
to the sea and sky.
The mood of the poem changes suddenly as Europa realises that she is being carried away across the sea, far beyond her known world. She finds no joy in the discovery that she has been tricked, abducted and violated by the great god Jupiter and that she is now his queen. In her new kingdom she is haunted by the many shades of black dark rooms, corridors, nightmares and fears of drowning and rape.
In Alvi's poetry, a woman's body is often used as a metaphor for the discovery of a new country. The poem culminates with Europa gazing into a mirror upon the varied landscapes of Europe, interwoven with memories of the ocean and her grieving father.
The third section of the book develops themes from the previous two, welding past and present, the ancient and the contemporary, to make a comment on the history of mankind a tale of war and conquest, adaptation, loss,
mutation and change — and cultural commingling.
In 'The Crossing' which describes the parting of the Red Sea for Moses, Alvi creates a wondrous fantasy of pathway flanked by stilled glassy translucent waters, embedded with fish, shells and seaweed.
In 'Honour' she uses the images of male violence, wounds and darkness which echo themes explored earlier in her portrayal of Europa and the Mermaid.
In 'The Veil' she asks
What is the veil but a kind of partition,
light as gossamer,
or dark as the River Styx?
Her interplay of words comments on perceptions and divisions, the real and the imagined. The poem culminates with these words
The world itself is veiled
The receding east, the receding
west.
This last section includes six poems 'after Jules Supervielle', the French World War II poet. These are a contemplation of war, violence and death amid the timeless European countryside and are a continuation of a series of poems in her fifth volume of poetry, which is included in Split World Poems 1990-2005.
Arranged in chronological order, Split World consists of all the poems that Alvi wishes to keep in print from each of her five collections and which also reveal her development as a poet. The daughter of an English mother and Pakistani father, she grew up in Hertfordshire.
The glimpses of an English childhood are followed by rich wondrous reminders in Britain of a distant Pakistan. She juxtaposes and sometimes merges her two worlds which include impressions of her first trip, as an adult, to India and Pakistan. She also embarks on an exploration of inner worlds as well as the fantastic and supernatural, which include a contemplation of the many dimensions of existence.
The collection leads up to How the Stone Found Its Voice, a series of poems about creation that was inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories and written in response to 9/11 and a world divided by misunderstandings. Some of Alvi's most famous poems including, 'The Country at My Shoulder', 'Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan', 'Carrying My Wife' and 'How the World Split in Two' have been reprinted in BloodAxe Poetry Introductions Elizabeth Alexander, Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker and Jackie Kay.
Edited by Neil Astley, it offers a rather fine selection of poems, along with an illuminating interview or autobiographical statement, by each contributor.
Europa
By Moniza Alvi
Bloodaxe Books
ISBN 978-185224-803-1
63pp. £7.95
Split World Poems 1990-2005
By Moniza Alvi
Bloodaxe Books
ISBN 978-1-85224-802-4
296pp. £10.95
Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions Elizabeth Alexander, Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay
Edited by Neil Astley
Bloodaxe Books
Northumberland, UK
ISBN 1-85224-731-2
96pp £7.95
