Imtiaz Dharker

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

My castaway this week is the poet and artist M. Tiaz Darka. Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for her work, her life seems a perfect reflection of the interrelatedness of the Commonwealth. Born in Pakistan, she was no more than a few months old when the family packed up their belongings and flew four thousand miles to start a new life, exchanging the blistering, dusty lanes of Lahore for the blustery, rain slicked roads of Glasgow.

Her father worked hard and from scratch built a big successful business and a comfortable life for his children. But the immigrant fairy tale came undone when his restless, well educated, and westernized daughter married in secret, running away to London and then Bombay. Scandalized her parents disowned her, she would never see her mother again. Her work centres on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life and gender politics.

The poet she says sees the world at a different angle, perhaps always as a kind of foreigner or an outsider. I think displacement is often a good and useful thing for a writer. So welcome and I wonder why do you think it is a useful thing I think it's quite good for poets not to be too comfortable. Poetry has to live on the dangerous edges of things where you can see life at a slant and where you're really hanging on by your fingernails.

so that you can write. And poets are great eavesdroppers on the world too, so half hearing things That's a good way to come to poetry because that's what poetry does as well. It tries to interpret the heartbeat of the world. And given that you've described yourself as a I love this, a Muslim Calvinist um hanging by your fingernails then with that description, uh tell me more about that. What does that encompass? Really, what I said was I am uh

Pakistani Scottish Calvinist Muslim adopted by India and married into Wales. And what I was really saying was don't try to put me in a box, don't try to label me as just one thing, because we're all subtle and nuanced creatures. with many possibilities under the skin. What I'm really saying is I'm a cultural mongrel. Accept that.

The subtle nuance of language then is all what great poetry is about. And I'm wondering you returned to live full time in Britain over a decade ago, I think it was you came to London again in two thousand and three. Some people bridle at the term at the very word multiculturalism. As a poet, what do you make of it? It's like all those labels. It it's come to be an empty word and you have to remake that word. To me it's a case of being outside of labels really, being outside of boxes.

I'd want to recognise that poetry takes in every kind of influence. That the family can be the ancestors in poetry could be not just John Dunn and Gerald Manley Hopkins, but Fez and Gallib and all of those become family.

Tell me about your first choice this morning then. What are we gonna hear? Well, when I was uh growing up in Glasgow, just about twelve years old. a friend came to visit from London and she wanted to go out and See the nightlife in Glasgow and she wanted jazz and she wanted something called Chris Baba. So we went out looking for this.

this thing called jazz, and went to the Plaza Ballroom on Eglinton Toll, and stood outside it and looked, but it was shut and dark And m years later I realised that what she was talking about was Chris Barber, B A R B E R. And I was imagining Barber because of the different difference in pronunciation. So recently I heard this piece by a group of sessions musicians who are from Lahore, Sachel Studios, and for me it was like discovering r finding Chris Barber at last in an unexpected location.

Let's see this. Take five, performed by the Satchill Studios Orchestra. So in Tales D'Ahart, your poem Campsy Fells is about. your memories of your friends and your extended family going out to those beautiful areas just beyond Glasgow, you say in their flowered frocks and wide chalwars, making Sunday trips to the these beautiful hills. How much I wonder did nineteen sixties Scotland feel like a place that you and your family loved and understood and that understood and loved you back?

Well there were lots of different things happening because Inside the house was one country and the moment you stepped outside it was another one altogether. But I think that's what I've got. you live with and understand and it seems normal. It seems quite natural that there are different cultures and different things going on. In fact at school for example, I was the first South Asian girl in the school, but I think it's the girl from Edinburgh who got the most flack. Is that true?

Yes, I think so, yes. And we loved Scotland. My father loved Scotland. That was why he was there. He loved the law. We used to go out on picnics every Sunday. And did you have Glaswegian friends uh that you welcomed into your home, or was it very much a sort of split personality? At home we are this type of family, but when we're out and about we're a Glaswegian family.

No, they would all come home. And my house was the kind of household where my mother had this kind of it's called barkat in her hands. It's a kind of blessing in the hands where whoever comes to the house there's always enough food. Any unexpected guest is always fed and there's always enough for them. It was a very sociable house

How much freedom were you given as a teenager? I know that i initially and for not very long I think you lived uh in a house at the edge of the Gorbles, th then a very tough part of Glasgow indeed. Then you moved to Pollock Shields, a lot more uh the Americans would say Tony, a much more tony neighborhood, a much nicer neighborhood. Tell me about the freedoms you were given or not as a teenager.

I was given every freedom to be educated, to look for education, to do my drawings and write as much as I wanted to, but I was not meant to go out in the night and and socialize and go dancing or anything like that. So a lot of my time in Glasgow was spent at my window looking out over the city and the shining light. And feeling as if all of life was happening somewhere else, somewhere out there, somewhere where I was not. Tell me about your second piece then. What are we going to hear now?

My mother and father were always listening to on Sundays they'd bring out the big Grundig spool to spool tape recorder. And it's a big buffalo of a machine. And they played on it songs that were love songs from home, it was always melancholy, they were guzzles as well. And they'd always be saying lines of poetry to each other. and often cry. But my mother also loved

a completely different side of her. She loved the tiller girls and dancing, especially tap. And this one was one she especially loved, Moses Supposes, from Singing in the Rain. A rose is a rose. A toes is a toes. Hoop-de-dooty-doo. Roses. ¡Suscríbete al canal! ¡Suscríbete al canal! Roses, roses, roses, roses, roses. Jean Kelly and Donald O'Connor singing and tap dancing away there with Moses supposes his toes is a roses from singing in the rain.

There was. There was. And I did uh do dance classes. I was never going to be Ginger Rogers, but it pleased my mother. And you went to Hutchie Grammar, which is an upmarket school i in Glasgow. There was you know, your father I described in the introduction he had he'd started really with nothing. He was a door to door salesman and he built up his business, isn't it?

Yes. Well yes, he arrived in London to study, but he went to Glasgow and to see some friends and they were actually young men who were making their way and they went up to sell door to door pennies and nylons, I expect. Right. And he loved it. He loved the Highlands. He loved Scotland and he decided he wanted to stay and and do that. Before anyone knew it he was importing sports goods from the Punjab from his own factories.

Yes, so we ended up with a a big solid business. Yes. Was it a well off household? By some point it was, yes. We were in in a lovely house with a beautiful garden. And you said that your parents would spend I love that image, you say this great big buffalo of a machine, the Grundig, that would be brought out on a Sunday and they would listen to music and they would quote poetry to each other.

That's right. It's quite a natural thing. I I grew up thinking that everyone who is Pakistani or Indian does this and one person would say a line and the other person would answer and then they would cry. And so you were witness at a young age to the power of words. It wasn't something that happened somewhere else or on a page. It was poetry that people were living by and getting emotional about and using as a kind of underscore for their own lives.

And so this smart, young, slightly romantic girl who would sit at the window watching all of Glasgow sparkling before her in the nighttime lights, when did she start writing her own poems? Well, I started writing poetry because I was in love with an older man. He was fourteen. Who was this? It was the boy across the road and I'd see his little pale moon face in the window across the way and he he'd do exercises. There was a poem about this.

I did, Alan or David or John, because I never knew his name. I wrote these love poems to him, but we never met. Let's have some more music, M T S Darker. What are we going to hear now? We're on your third.

Well, I ran away to India with a an unsuitable m man. But it was a a great place to be. India opened its arms to me and it was generous and adopted me in a way. But it was life at full blast. There's a daily attack on the senses there of taste and sound and languages. And it also demanded poems, so I began to write quite seriously. But the song that I'm about to ask for

is like the soundtrack to Bombay, this assault that happened for me. It's um a roller coaster love song. And the words are by the great Urdu poet and film lyricist Javedakhtar. And the singer is Shankar Mahadevan. They met when they were working on a film that I was making about street children and then they went on to collaborate on this song that I think is a great song. Shankar Madhivan singing breathless there.

running away, but let's just find out how you you came to that point. Th this first marriage that you plunged into as a a restless young woman, it sounds on paper, like a sort of coup de foudre. There was this man and you fell for him. But actually, in c on closer inspection I wonder if it's something more complicated than that. Than rather than some great grand love affair. It was because it opened up your world rather than it was the single person, if I'm not being unfair to the man himself.

I think that's very perceptive, yes. Of course. I was young, I was looking for life, I was looking for doors to open and of course I fell in love with him. He was on the faculty or at Glasgow University. I was a student. Together we would look at poetry and go to the theatre and talk cinema, and to me those were great things. Did your parents know about the relationship? No, I couldn't tell them anything about it. Why?

If I had, I think I'd have been packed up and sent away to Pakistan right away. And what happened? After I had taken my final exams and and was about to wind up at university, I was at the union one day, the Queen Margaret Union, when there was an announcement on the Tanoi system asking me to come downstairs. And there he was. I didn't know he was going to come. He he was there and he said, Will you marry me? And I said, No.

No way. Where have you come from? But he was very f persuasive and he had got a sheriff's dispensation so that we didn't actually have to wait the fifteen days that you're not. With your bands up. The bands. I was wearing black. I hadn't expected to get married that day. Finally I said yes. Where are you sure you wanted to do it?

By that point I had decided, yes, I'm going to go along with this and you're young. You want to go out and do things and it's all exciting and and to me I said, Yes, I'll be penniless and and run away and leave my family behind and it was a decision. Yes, a decision taken in uh in an afternoon.

I don't want to get too mired in the tiny details, but I'm interested as to whether actually you then went home and collected your belongings and headed off, or did you leave with nothing? This is a very sore point. I d I did have to go home and the regret I have is not that I left because I think for my own reasons I needed to leave, but my regret is the way I left. And it's something that I will I will always be sorry about. I never saw my mother again.

Having having last seen her when, when you waved as you left out the door to go to the studies that morning? It's easy when we're young to think in these broad brush strokes, isn't it, that I want to go out and I want to paint the world all the colours of the rainbow and at the age and stage you are at now How do you view that that decision that changed the path of your life?

I have no regrets about doing it. I think that everything that happened to me and the way that I grew were all things that needed to happen. I wish that I could have taken my family with me, I wish that I could have carried them along, and that I could have spoken to them. What's your last image of the f of the family home as you left? What do you remember? It was leaving vi a very s tiny tiny white. And in it were the sayings of Chairman Mao and a pair of shoes and running out in the dark.

And going to a neighbour's house not far away and waiting to be picked up in a taxi by Your new husband? Let's have some more music then M T S dark. We're on your fourth. Tell me about this. This is your daughter singing here actually. Yes. Uh arriving in India I got involved with making film and every new film I made, usually for non government organizations, about health and education and shelter.

was like going to university again. And one of the things I did was an audiovisual on the architecture of India with a great architect called Charles Korea. And on the soundtrack of that is a Gujarati folk song, sung in a child's voice. And the child is actually my daughter. She was very little at the time.

Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok बेटा वाला, वो चोमा बैना साला, वो कजर्टा काकाला, ने बूरी बंजी वाला, मारू चक दोर चाले チャカチューチーチーチーチーチーチーチーチーチーチーチーチー Charara Charara Maru Chakrochali, I hope I said that properly. She must have been about five at the time. How utterly beautiful that was. Um so you developed a career then as as you say, making

short documentary films for NGOs. Um what do you think, I wonder, can be communicated through poetry that can't more effectively be communicated through the more modern things like like film and music and so? Well poetry uses language in a different way. I think it it uses language to say things that go beyond the actual meaning of the words. when it speaks well it can say what is really unsayable.

Let me ask you so so many of your books are woven through I introduced you as a poet and artist and I did that very deliberately because your artwork is a huge part of your artistic offering to people. These very, very close and detailed Line drawings. Is it important for y the understanding of your words that the pictures are also there?

When I begin to put a line on a page, sometimes I don't know whether the line is going to become a poem or a drawing. I work on A four paper and it could be either. They're not illustrations of the poems, but they do happen that when I'm thinking around a theme, the drawings work around that theme as well. And for me it's just a different extension of the same things that are going on in my mind.

You lived for almost would it be about thirty years then at Bombay as it then was, Mumbai as it now is. Um what was it that made you return to the UK? I had married but uh an Indian and gone to to Bombay and that was wonderful. And I have a beautiful daughter to show for it. But there was a point where we began to grow apart. Maybe I just grew up. So we had separated and one day I had a fax from an organisation called Poetry Live saying, Come and read at these forty events.

and when I came to read I met this incredible man called Simon Powell, whose idea it was to start poetry life. Everyone loved him. It took me a few years ago. Well we'll talk a little bit more about Simon and your relationship and marriage in a moment, but for now we must hear some music. Tell me about this, your fifth disc. Well, we're going to hear the Bach to Kata and Fugue in D minor.

And the reason for this is at school it was a kind of school where we were supposed to be quite proper. We had hats and hat pins and thirty denier crep stockings. And there was this great music teacher who was trying very hard to teach us green sleeves and we were mauling it. So when she gave up she decided to play us this piece of Bach. And suddenly this class of wild beast were tamed. I was struck by the mystery of it and that never left me. It turned my brain inside out.

And years later this was a music that was played when I married Simon, and when I hear it I still see him turning around to look at me and his silvery Welsh eyes sparkling. Part of the toccata from Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D minor for the organ performed by Claymans Schnorr. So this great love affair landed in your life and you got married to Simon Powell, and I'm wondering how that love and how that difference in location and circumstance affected your work.

I think what it did was strangely enough, in spite of the circumstances, it made me see how important it was to laugh in the work as well. I'd come from a background where poetry was very often melancholy. And suddenly, with this wonderful man Simon, I've never laughed so much in my life as I did when I was with him. I we were together seven years, but seventy wouldn't have been enough. And he had an incurable cancer but the Royal Marsden gave him time and life.

he used that life to enjoy as much as he could and I think that laughter found its way into the poetry. And what about, he had begun this Poetry Live movement where poets are invited to come and talk in front of a couple of thousand people at a time, young people read their poetry. Are you somebody who enjoys performing or do you have to steal yourself to do I do enjoy it. Because what's happening is the word is coming off the page. Simon's idea was a simple idea.

The word is taken off the page and what these young people, this audience hears, is the voice and the breath and the accent of the poet. And you mentioned when we began uh talking today about y you know, you said hanging by your fingertips on the side of of life and often it can be at those moments o of death actually, to be frank, that

Poetry comes into its own. People often who never ever read poetry will find themselves not simply just going through the practical motions of maybe picking a verse to be read at somebody's commemoration or burial or funeral. but actually themselves for the first time, begin to properly read poetry. Even though perhaps your rational mind can say one thing that this person is gone, poetry is able to recreate, bring back

uh it's almost like looping time and letting time coexist in a poem. It does speak to people. I I've had people write to me after seeing a poem on the underground and say I was moved to tears on the train. And I know how I feel when I read Auden, for example. It m makes it possible to live. Let's have some music then. Tell me about this and and why you've chosen it. This is a Leonard Cohen, but it's a version of Leonard Cohen sung by Anthony Hagerty.

We used to listen to this kind of mus oh well Leonard Cohen of obviously on many car journeys, driving up to Wales to the family or to Scotland and and one day Simon came in very excited and he said, Listen to this version. And it's a version that I think is very beautiful.

If it be your will, written by Leonard Cohen and sung there by Anthony Hegerty, you mentioned in introducing that piece of music, uh M T S Darker, that you you often would listen to it travelling home to Simon's family in Wales to visit them.

You know, you you spoke very poignantly of never seeing your mother again after walking out with your little white suitcase and your pair of shoes and your uh Chairman Mao book. How did you repair relationships with the rest of your family? When did you do that? I think it happens when you have children of your own. Everyone had children and and they were so beautiful and they were beyond any risk.

children take you to a place where you have to open your arms again and and begin to speak again. And begin to say, Oh, I recognise that. That's just like my mother would have done. And what did your siblings tell you about those days and weeks and months after you had gone? You know a beloved daughter that they had so much hope and expectation for, and there then was this Imtiaz shaped hole in the family, you weren't there any longer. Have you spoken to your siblings about that?

We don't speak about that. It's too it's too too painful. Even now. Are you able to write about it in your poetry? I haven't got to that yet. I can see it coming. Uh there is there are things to say about my father and my mother, which I never did say, and uh maybe yes I I I am thinking in that direction. I understand that under sort of p slightly confusing and odd circumstances you you did

once or twice meet your father just fleetingly. In fact I think it was at seems such an unlikely location. It was at Heathrow Airport, is that right? Yes, my sister told me that my father was coming through Heathrow and I went to see him to waylay him really and I hadn't seen him for ten years. And so I w saw him coming through and I went up to him and I said

Hello and he said hello and carried on walking as if I were an acquaintance. He said, How are you? And I realised that he hadn't quite registered, so I said, I'm Imtyaz, I'm your daughter. And he didn't recognise me, but i I think it it's possibly because I had green hair at that point with spikes. Right. He carried on walking through very politely and he went on through but he did come back. He said, I'm sorry I and I didn't realise and give me a hug and went on into the domestic transit.

Beth ydych chi'n ei ddauwch â'i ddauwch â'i ddauwch â'i ddauwch â'i ddauwch â'i ddauwch â'i ddau? She really wants to know, you know. I had in some ways I'd closed the book and put it away. Because when you leave like that you've really said, Well, I'm gone now and and for me It's done. So in many ways I had shut that part of the year.

what happened out of my mind. But my daughter wants to know. She wants to know about my mother's green fingers because she has them too. Things that I've forgotten. Family history that actually I never knew because I didn't know them when I'd grown up.

Let's have some more music. We're going to listen to your your seventh choice. In indeed it's not really music. Well, some people might say it is. Um tell us about this. What are we gonna hear? I've always loved the sound of trains, wet platforms and the terrible waiting rooms and the cafes and the country rolling past and all those journeys rocking up through England to Wales and Scotland. So this is Nightmare, the poem by WH Auden for the the film with the Benjamin Britton score.

This is a thanks. Mid Lovers declarations and gossip gossip from all the nations, news circumstantial, news financial letters with Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, notes from overseas to Hebrides, written on paper of everyone. the bad at the bite in the blue.

Filmmaker John Grierson was narrating there and the voice we heard reading W. H. Orden's Nightmare was Stuart Legg. And indeed W. H. Orden was one of the recipients of uh the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, as indeed you were um yourself, in Tiaz Darker last uh Was it last year you got? It was twenty fourteen. Yes, with with Stevie Smith and Ted Hughes behind you and so on and so on. Um, when you first hear heard the news, what was your immediate visceral reaction?

It was first of all I d I didn't believe it. I didn't know how I could dare to be standing in this company. But of course I was delighted. Then when my father died he was almost a hundred years old. But in the last few weeks occasionally family names would slip out of his head. But the person he remembered was the Queen. And he spoke of her right up to the end with great admiration and affection, so I know that he'd be delighted. He'd have forgiven me something if he'd known about this.

The cruelty of this exchange of course is that I'm about to cast you away to a desert island. It's easy probably to work out what it is you'll you'll miss, n not least I'm guessing your daughter and your extended family. But what do you think you might quite enjoy about being on this island? You know, looking on the good side of it, of course I'd miss people, but uh looking on the the better side of it, I think I'd enjoy the the time to think and

just be with my own imagination. It would be a fantasy island for me. Let's have your final piece then. Tell me about your uh eighth choice of the morning. Well, I work late in the night And wherever I am in the night. I come at twelve forty five. to hear sailing by and the shipping forecast. Because in the face of all the terrible things that go on in the world, it's like a little old fashioned reassurance.

And the shipping forecast for me is like a that secular prayer of Caroline Duffy's which I always remember, darkness outside, inside the ra radio's prayer, Rockhall, Mallon, Dogger, Finister. And for me there's also the the idea that something continues, that sailors and all the lost souls will in the world will be safe because someone is there.

Now on Radio four time for the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency at double O one five on today Tuesday the fifth of may. There are warnings of gale.

No, you're not hearing things. That was sailing by in the shipping forecast read by Radio Four's very own Luke Tuttenham there and it's been chosen as our eighth disc of the morning. In Tia's Darker. I want to now of course give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along with you. What will your book be?

First of all with the Bible I'd like to make sure it's the King James version for the language. Yes. Now my book I'd like it to be an atlas of all the world. Oh. Uh a sort of created one as well. But with A to Z of every city and every village and every country lane and every coastline so that I can make up my own stories in my own theatre of the world. I love novels and and books and stories that locate things. I love the locations of things. And I don't know.

be able to use my imagination on all those and have the whole world with me on the desert island. Well we must hope that such a book exists because you're almost straying into your luxury territory as well then. That almost sounds like a luxury, but I I will just about allow it. So tell me what your luxury is. Well my luxury is even bigger. I could I have the whole V and A? Oh yes, you can have the whole Victoria and Albert Museum in London, then it's yours.

I'm very glad because I thought maybe it would be a bit um presumptuous and It's fine. The only thing is that maybe I'd be depriving other people of this beautiful thing. It's your desert island discs and you get to choose it. Other people will simply have to deal with the consequences. Yeah. Yes, so that is yours. And finally, if you had to choose only one of these eight discs, which one would it be?

It would be sailing by and the shipping forecast. Because until I I have that I don't really feel at rest in the night. It's yours, Mtias Darka, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island disc. Thank you. You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Website bbc.com UK slash radio four