Moniza Alvi at The Time of Partition
Moniza Alvi at The Time of Partition
Moniza Alvi at The Time of Partition
Partition (extract 1)
This is one of two excerpts from a long single
poem in twenty parts, 'At the Time of Partition'. My
grandmother, a widow, made the journey with,
initially, five of her children, from Ludhiana in
India, to Lahore, in the newly created Pakistan.
Her eldest son, Ute, a young man who suffered
brain damage as a result of a childhood accident,
disappeared at that time, never to be found again:
the fate of many vulnerable adults and children.
The line of partition was drawn up so arbitrarily by
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, it was often referred to as the
'Radcliffe Line.'
1. The Line
A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak.
DOORS
I observed that her knuckles were raw
with the effort of knocking on doors.
FROM ‘AT THE TIME OF PARTITION’
Part 3: Better By Far
By bus?
islanded, apart
from every danger,
journeying swiftly
across the unsegmented sky –
cross-legged, daydreaming,
disentangling hello from goodbye.
Poet's Note: This is an extract from a poem inspired by the story of Athar, my
father’s younger brother, who was one of the hundreds of thousands who
disappeared at the time of the partition of India. My grandmother and her
family made the crossing from India to the new country ‘Pakistan’ by bus.
Part 4:
Ever After
Ever after
she heard it as an echo
in her inner ear, disembodied,
as, in a sense, all voices are –
Under duress,
it was dauntingly calm.
Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore in Pakistan, the daughter of a Pakistani father and
an English mother. She moved to England when she was a few months old, and
grew up in Hertfordshire. She didn’t revisit Pakistan until after her first book of
poems, The Country at My Shoulder, was published.
Alvi’s poetry is imbued with a spirit of duality, partition, fractured identity and
transformation: her early work was concerned with homelands – real and imagined – in
poems which are “vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the
surreal – this poet's third country” (Maura Dooley). In these poems she imagines what it
would have been like never to have left, to have grown up in Pakistan rather than
having left and become a different person.
As well as divisions between what she has called “the receding east, the receding
west”, her later work also explores the interplay between inner and outer worlds,
imagination and reality, physical and spiritual experience. She has written translations
or versions of the poetry of the French poet Jules Supervielle, as well as taking on the
myth of Europa.
Her poem ‘Europa and the Bull’ imagines the rape of Europa, the Phoenician princess,
by Jupiter, the greatest European god – a story that deals explicitly with both the
conquest of the East by the West, and the conquest of women by men:
Alvi’s themes of division and identity are evident in her fascination with otherness, and a
predilection for the surreal. Her imagery can render the familiar strange, and the strange
familiar.
Her books include Homesick for the Earth, her versions of the French poet Jules
Supervielle, and Split World: Poems 1990–2005 (2008), which includes poems from her
five previous collections. How the Stone Found Its Voice (2005) draws on Kipling’s Just So
Stories for the titles (‘How the City Lost Its Colour’, ‘How the Countries Slipped Away’) of
dark, yet delicate, parables. The Country at My Shoulder was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot
and Whitbread poetry prizes, and Carrying My Wife was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation. Europa was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2008. Moniza Alvi
received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002.
At the time of writing in autumn 2011, she is currently working on a long poem inspired
by a family story and the partition of India and Pakistan.
After working for many years as a secondary school teacher in London, she is now a
freelance writer and a tutor, particularly for the Poetry School. She lives in
Wymondham, Norfolk.
© Katy Evans-Bush
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Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hertfordshire. After working
for many years as a secondary school teacher in London, she is now a
freelance writer and tutor, and lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. Her latest books
are Blackbird, Bye Bye, out in 2018; her book-length poem, At the Time of
Partition (Bloodaxe Books, 2013); Homesick for the Earth, her versions of the
French poet Jules Supervielle (Bloodaxe Books, 2011); Europa (Bloodaxe
Books, 2008); and Split World: Poems 1990-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2008),
which includes poems from her five previous collections, The Country at My
Shoulder (1993), A Bowl of Warm Air (1996), Carrying My Wife (2000), Souls
(2002) and How the Stone Found Its Voice (2005). The Country at My
Shoulder was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes, and
Carrying My Wife was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Europa and
At the Time of Partition were selected as Poetry Book Society Choices in
2008 and 2013 respectively and both were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Moniza Alvi received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002. A collection of her
poems was published in Italy by Donzelli Editore in their Poesia series in
2014, Un mondo diviso, translated by Paola Splendore.