Poets: Imtiaz Dharker and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Thirty years after two civilian airplanes were shot down, why is the US government now bringing charges against the former Cuban president Raul Castro? I'm Asma Khalid and I host the Global Story Podcast. From the BBC. Cuba's government is calling this all a political maneuver, but the Cuban exile community in Miami calls it just. Thirty years in the making. Is the US setting the stage for a military intervention? For more, check out the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the conversation. It's about women and by women, but it's for everyone. From the BBC World Source.

Hi, I'm Kim Chakanetsa and we are talking about poetry on the conversation today. A show that flies the flag for talented women across the world by bringing together two women who have something in common. Unlike most of us, the poems of my two guests today did not end up in a long forgotten notebook. Their work has won awards. Joining me in the studio today is the poet Mtiaz Daka. She was born in Pakistan, but she's now based in the UK.

Hello.

Good afternoon.

You two have never met, so I want to give you a chance to say hello to each other.

Hello Philippa, it's wonderful to speak to you.

That's when I'm not sure.

so excited. Well let's get started then. M Tears, how did you first become interested in um language and in poetry?

I think it starts when children are really young, when you begin to discover language first of all and realise that you can play with it, that it can jump and hop and skip. But then s you know, sometimes that's that's beaten out of you by time. When I rediscovered Gerard Manley Hopkins and realised that what he was doing

That's an English board, right?

Centuries ago, but he was playing with ac mae John Dunn wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'

When I was little I liked rhyme. I liked the music. and the patterns that you make with poems. And the languages that I was ex exposed to were English, there was Afrikaans, there was German, there was Zulu, there was Su So it was like that other thing of being a child and hearing people talking and eavesdropping. A lot of the time eavesdropping is as if there's there's a certain word that you pick up.

Well, uh Philip, I of I often feel po we poets are like magpies, we pick up things from many different places and it sounds as if you have the ability to do that because you've got so many languages that you have access to. Do you think you're a bit of a magpie like me?

Yes, I think I am. Although I I don't really know how But I'm curious about words and I love

I find that for me, Punjabi and the taste of the Punjabi, the Marati, the Gujarati come into the poems, even even if it's English. You get a taste of those other things coming in as well.

Yes, you do. People who write in English but from other language backgrounds, I really believe that that imprint is there somewhere in the shadows. There's this ghost.

I know that that for me I didn't realise I was listening to poetry, but I was listening to songs of Fez and Guzels by Galib, which were the songs that my parents would be playing on Sundays on on the tape recorder. And I know that that somehow has seeped in. But how do you think it has come to you?

My mother was more into poetry and my father was in the listening to music but he listened to like Bing Crosby that kind of pop music for old people. Um but my mother travelled a lot and she used to often bring music back and I would listen sometimes And then we didn't have TV when I was growing up. So on the radio the radio was being played.

closed things, but actually our culture is all those things that we've been exposed to when we grew up and the things we're still exposed to every day. I think culture's like a living person, it's like a a changing living thing.

agree with you. I agree with you. And that's what I love so much about your poetry because I don't feel any anxiety about where you belong because you saw that you belong everywhere. Do you think that's important for

To be at home i I think is actually quite important for a poet not to be too comfortable. I don't know about you, but to to know that you're in the cracks, that to know that you're you you don't belong inside any one thing. Uh I've always felt as if I inhabit the spaces between. But then you make that your space.

You both had your poems published um while you were still at school. Do you remember, MTS, the satisfaction of seeing your work?

It was astonishing. Because first of all this little scribble on paper, which actually it was not not really a scribble, it was quite a tightly formed poem. But it was my handwriting on paper which is Personal. And suddenly this handwriting on paper a teacher had taken it and printed it in a magazine and it looked like a different shape when it was printed, it looked like a different creature when it was printed.

For me it was really amazing. I loved it because it was so real. It was suddenly something that I had written, the first one that was public. was when I was twelve and I'd written into a newspaper competition and then it was on the page It was also just so exciting to see me out there that anyone could read and any and I was going home with a whole lot of strangers and I really liked

Both of you write a lot about your own personal life experiences, um, Mt. S and Philippa. So I wanna ask a little bit about those. Um now MTS, you were born in Pakistan. I was. Um and raised in Scotland. Then you eloped How old are you?

Well I left Pakistan when I was six months old, so I hardly remember it. But Scotland was, you know, the place where I grew up and there were cultures, three cultures inside the house and more outside. And then I met and married a Hindu Indian. and went off to live in Bombay. But you do these things when you're young. You're not even realising that you're crossing borders and breaking boundaries and breaking through walls. So you you you do these odd things.

How old were you?

I was 17 when I met him. But finished university and went off to India. And most of my working life was spent in India.

And what did your parents make of your decision to look at?

My parents never spoke to me aga my my I didn't see my mother again ever. Oh father, I met him ten years later at an airport.

Oh well.

Wow, it's that courage, that courage of following your heart.

I don't think so. I don't think it's courage at that age. I think it's uh not knowing. I think it's ignorance. I think it's she uh she has shear silliness and just as you said, following your heart, but you do it out of lust or whatever it is and you g and you go. You f follow the man.

Yeah.

I have no regret. I might uh not do it differently. I might I might do the same thing, but I try to be gentler and kinder with everyone I left behind. I'd I'd like to have kept the links and kept my parents somehow with me.

I don't know if it's actually possible because I've got a very similar kind of story. I am a mixed race and I was adopted by a white family. And the whole condition of me being in that family was that nobody could ever tell me that I was adopted. because it would open up an inquiry into my race.'Cause I mean, it was so obvious from sort of the beginning of school that I didn't belong with my family because I was black and they were all white.

But you must have been so confused growing up, before you were twenty, as a as a teenager, as a young girl. The confusion of of looks and and what other people perceived of you. Living that incredible lie that you didn't know was a lie, that must have been so terrible.

It was really, really confusing. It just made me into an actress. You know, I just performed all the time. And I didn't really know how I felt about anything. Um, I only really started exploring who I really was.

So actually you used your story so beyond the narrative, you used it to turn your life into art. You have used the personal and turned it into something else by using the poetry.

I think in a sense I felt so betrayed by my parents who brought me up and I felt like for a long time I didn't feel like I could comfortably own the culture that they'd given me. So I had to make one up for myself and that involved exploring who I was in different ways and also opening myself to other influences, things that had been nudging at the door of my subconscious as a child all along, but I'd always kept it closed because I thought I was white.

Hm. Well Philippa, let's hear some of your work. Um which poem are you going to read for us?

It's called Come Back Africa. Um and it was written in response to finding my bolo biological father. So now in nineteen ninety four when South Africa was liberated, there was a great pressure to become African. So many people had been living under names like Dorothy when actually their names were Um Tunzikazi. I was yearning to also join that same trend and become part of the new South Africa. So I wrote this poem, Come.

That was an excerpt from the poem Come Back Africa by Philippe Villiers, and you can hear the full poem on our website. Joining Philippa on the conversation today is Pakistani born British poet Mtiaz Darker. Now earlier we were discussing how they became poets. Now let's turn to the actual writing process.

Well, the first thing that happens is anywhere in a taxi at a railway station in the busiest, noisiest places a line comes and you write it down on a paper napkin and it becomes something that I work on. And this is the thing that I I wonder about Philippa because yes, we're working from things that are part of our personal lives. We're working from the extremely personal, but somehow that has to become something bigger than us.

Yeah. But though except you never know. You know, when I I didn't know I was a poet at all. I just writing this stuff. reciting it at poetry sessions'cause I liked being there. And then I did this Crossing Borders, which was a kind of a distance learning poetry scheme where African poets got teamed up with UK And my poet, my tutor, my mentor was John Lindley. And it was the first time that I wrote a lot of the poems, very personal poems about being adopted.

Yes. So your mentor helped you to take it beyond the simple idea of writing the personal writing therapy up to something which is craft, because that's really when it becomes something bigger.

Well, you see, the thing, Imtias, is that somehow I only craft after I've written the poem, going back to it and cutting out what didn't need to be. And then a couple of days And I read it out aloud. And I can hear if there's something that shouldn't be there.

I I th you're absolutely right. I I think so much of crafting the poem is actually cutting it down to the bare bones. the sharp thing. Uh the sharp thing that hurts, but then you've crafted it to make it hurt. The second thing you're saying, which is really interesting to me, is reading it aloud because I think that has to happen with a poem. It's not a poem unless you hear the music when you read it aloud.

But how do you know when a poem is finished?

You never really want to let it out of the way.

Never finished. You know sometimes I go back to my first collection of poets. Why didn't they stop?

And yet in the first collection there's something raw which mattered, something raw which maybe you've honed a little more in the later later poems. So that rawness is interesting as well.

Well in Tiaz, I would like to talk about your recent collection um which was about the loss of your second husband. Difficult was it for you to write about your private grief?

I think that's what I was really talking about when I talked about things being too raw. I tried to write at first and it was just uh like a howl. It was an unformed thing and I was putting things down on paper. But it was when I began to realise that what I was writing was not grief poems but love poems.

No, Mtias, you are in the unusual um position of being also a very accomplished um artist. How do you work out what is the best way to express yourself?'Cause are s certain things better suited to a drawing and certain things better suited to a poem.

Well I work around themes where it's really the poems and the drawings happening at the same time and sometimes when I pick up a pen and I work only on loose leaf papers, I d don't actually know whether it's going to become a poem or a drawing. So I can be doodling a line and the doodle can become a line of a poem or it can become a drawing and I just don't know. So I always have a black pen with waterproof ink in it.

Yeah, and I find that so interesting about you and also you make films.

Rydyn ni'n gweithio filmau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio filmau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio filmau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio filmau.

You know, clearly you have a And so what part of that Comes into your poems all

I think you know, Philippa as well, you never write you can never write about, you have to write with an idea. You know, it's with a subject, with something that excites you or makes you angry or you know, people sometimes say I'm a political poet. I d I don't mean that. To me, breathing is political. Water is political. Everything every single thing we need to live. is political. I um obviously I don't mean party political, but

I think sometimes I've disappointed people because I wrote this poem of called Tifu Tabo when t uh Tabo Mumbeki was the president. And the neoliberal economic system. was really starting to play havoc with the people of South Africa. Um people were losing their houses. So I wrote T for Table but I I wasn't thinking about politics. I was just writing about what I was seeing and what I was I was experiencing.

I think we we both know that when we write thinking about what people are going to think of us, it doesn't work. And really the inspiration has to be things that make us Excited or angry or happy in in our own life and those can come out of a newspaper, it can come out of a television screen, it can come out of conversations we hear passing by. But that's the inspiration, isn't it?

Another poem of yours which I really thought was full of that very same magic of not knowing where it's going to go is honor killer.

Let's hear the poem on a killing.

Honor killing. At last I'm taking off this coat, this black coat of a country that I swore for years was mine, that I wore more out of habit than design. Born wearing it, I believed I had no choice. I'm taking off this veil, this black veil of a faith that made me faithless to myself, that tied my mouth, gave my god a devil's face, and muffled my own voice.

Amazing poem.

I started that poem in a fury. I started writing the poem Honor Killing because of something that happened in Pakistan at the end of the twentieth century. A woman was shot. by her family in her lawyer's office and her crime was that she'd asked for a divorce. And at the time the whole Pakistan Senate refused to condemn it because they called it an honour killing.

Yeah. Philippa, um since nineteen ninety four we've seen in South Africa a real blossoming um of various creative fields. I'm just wondering, is poetry one of the mediums that is flourishing in South Africa now?

Definitely, it definitely is. Um poetry but poetry's always been there before nineteen ninety four. Struggle poetry. Uh after nineteen ninety-four there were more opportunities, especially for women to be public. And so since two thousand there's really been an outpouring of poetry

What is the poetry about mainly? Is it very political in nature?

It's political and it's personal. Everyone I suppose their poetry is is a mix of who they are and what they've read and you know, what's simmering in them.

Do you think that um poetry is more associated with women than men?

I read to a lot of young people and it's boys and girls. And very often the boys think it's not something that they should be involved in. But actually once they get in there and hear it, they see that it's about their own lives as well. Especially if they hear it read by people who are alive.

Definitely. I think young people really, really respond to poetry and that's actually what's keeping poetry alive in South Africa. because young people just they use poetry all the time and they love poetry so much. There are poetry sessions everywhere, at funerals, at weddings everywhere there's poetry that's being composed and I think that that's really exciting.

It feels like a more generous space than publishers. Who are uh like Bloodaxe, for example, your staying alive anthology, who bring in voices from all over the world, and especially women's voices who might have been silenced before because women were not heard as much as And now these publishers are beginning to let them be heard. So

and marketed is not very easy for a lot of poets to access. And then on the other hand we don't have a huge reading culture. We have more of a listening there's a lot of opportunities. The business hasn't really come to to the party yet.

MTS, what single piece of advice would you give to an aspiring poet who might be listening to this?

I start by saying to any young person, read poetry, uh listen. Listen to a lot of poetry. Decide what you like. You won't like all of it. Some of it will mean something to you, some of it won't. And then if you want to write Find your own voice. Because that authentic voice is what will really come through.

Well, I would second that a hundred percent and I think also respond to things, even if they seem unimportant. Write to them and listen for the voices in your head, the voices of the poets that you've read, who will come and sit. Over your shoulder while you're writing your poem.

Filipe and MTS, thank you both very, very much.

Thank you, Kim. Thank you, Philip. It was great talking to you.

Thank you, M Tia.

If you want to dive into the brains of more creative women, then do check out our previous episodes with fantasy writers and children's book authors. They're just a small selection of our brilliant and burgeoning archive, and they are available as podcasts for those who like to listen on the go. Go online to BBC The Conversation. Thanks as always for your company, and if you do feel inspired to put pen to paper

Thirty years after two civilian airplanes were shot down. Why is the US government now bringing charges against the former Cuban president Raul Castro? I'm Asma Khalid, and I host the Global Story Podcast. From the BBC. Cuba's government is calling this all a political maneuver, but the Cuban exile community in Miami calls it. 30 years in the making. Is the U.S. setting the stage for a military intervention? For more, check out the global story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.