Excerpt from M.Phil thesis: The poet discussed here is Maki Kureishi from Pakistan:

This excerpt is taken from my M.Phil thesis on four poets from Pakistan writing in English. The thesis is a critical evaluation of the selected poetry of the poets creating, in their own way, a new place in the post- colonial annals of English poetry.  

In Kureishi the “small lives” are sheltered as valuable parts of the wholeness of the self, though, ironically, this wholeness is that of a “Love short-circuited”. Keeping Kureishi’s poem “Kittens” in this context, the suggestion of use of violence to retain the unity of the self is the common motif in the two poets, however, the self in Kureishi is not a limited, personal, feminine self in this poem, but a wider socio-political self. The desire to retain the unity is a desire to retain the disintegrating cultural and socio-political unity even if one has to become violent. Her concern for Pakistani cultural schizophrenia is given overt form in her poems on Karachi and its disintegrating and deteriorating socio-political scene: ‘Fear’, ‘Snipers In Karachi’, ‘Elegy for Karachi’ & ‘Curfew Summer’ are the poems where the “Furies come unpromised”. Her grief for the unjust violence let loose in Karachi by the Unknown forces is expressed in the poem “Fear” in terms of Greek mythology.

Though, as established earlier, Maki’s is not a particularly feminist ⁽²²⁾ voice she does show a very strong sense of despising flesh, and resents its association with vulnerability, disease and death. Her poems with a disabled woman as persona reflect this hatred for flesh and a suicidal “ironic self rejection”.⁽²³⁾ In the poems ‘Arthritic hands’, ‘Cripple’, ‘Therapy for Brain Damage’ and ‘For a Victim of Cerebral Palsy’ she works as an impressionist by looking at her object from various angles as an expression of a social drama. The use of pronouns “She”, “I”, “You”, “We”, “Them”, etc. dramatize the varied attitudes she has adopted towards, and the angles of distance she has maintained from the object. She generalizes the particular and comes out at her best in the Modernist tradition in using the autobiographical element with an unmatched impersonality and objectivity. From another angle this grotesque persona evokes the concept of a woman’s body (or perhaps her femininity) as an incurable disease with no hope of purging ever

Notes:

22.  Ostriker, Alicia. p, 248.

23.  Putting kittens, dogs and a child in a parallel must be a reflection of a love for the pets, and not reducing the child to their level, as the phrase “shelter small lives” indicates.

24.  At least two of Maki Kureishi’s poems in an anthology Wordfall (O.U.P 1975)—‘Gracious Lady’ and ‘Marriage’ are knit around feminist themes, with an element of irony though. A woman’s concern for beauty, social decorum, details of domestic routine, the drab and loveless marital bondage etc. are the subject of these poems. These themes are symptomatic feminist concerns in the 20^th century women poets and are evaluated as trivialities by the androcentric and androgynous literary critics as explained in Alicia Ostriker’s critical essay “Body Language…”. Kureishi, however, manages to transcend to the stratum of an androgynous Modernist in her techniques of irony, juxtaposition, image and symbol. Out of a fear of creating “an erroneous impression” (“Introduction” The Far Thing. p, xvi.) Adrian Akbar Husain did not select some of Kureishi’s poems from her anthology Wordfall (OUP, 1975). One suspects a patriarchal disliking for the feminist idiom working behind this selection. The feminist idiom, I believe, has a natural place in the phases of development of a woman poet—as, perhaps, an early expression of her peculiar feminine fate.

25.  Adrian A. Husain calls this element “burlesque” in his introduction to The Far Thing relating it to Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’,  pp, x.

26.  Thomson, Philip. “Function and Purpose of the Grotesque”. The Grotesque: The Critical Idiom Series. Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1972, 1979. p, 59.

27.  Ibid. p, 21.

28.  Parthasarathy. A. R. (Ed.). Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets. New Delhi, OUP, 1976. p, 27.

29.  Ibid. p, 23.

30.  Ibid. p, 22.

31.  Ostriker, Alicia. p, 248.