A Dialogue between the Third-World Writers and Their English Audiences: Influence of English Literature in the Urdu Love Poetry of Perveen Shakir in Khushboo
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Perveen Shakir describes her first collection, Khushboo, as unveiling of ‘a girl inside her.’ Shakir, a Modern Romantic Urdu poetess, living in a Pakistani Islamic society upsets all the norms which dictate that women should be submissive and silent. This chapter will discuss Khushboo with reference to the role of a teenage Muslim girl in a Pakistani society and argue that Shakir’s depiction of sex desire ‘inside her’ gives a new and a bold perception to the traditional role of women in her society. Dialogism will be applied to provide a new perspective on the study of Urdu love poetry, as it will translate to the English audiences how Shakir influenced by canonical English poet such as, John Donne, provides an original voice for the suppressed and oppressed Pakistani Muslim girl, one which has hitherto been silenced under the male-dominated culture and the strict Islamic laws against women. It will also look into the concept of transculturation framing Mary Louis Pratt’s theory of ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’ to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. It will elaborate upon transculturation to describe how the members of subordinate or marginal groups invent from material transmitted from a dominant culture, and in doing so connect with other cultures. Shakir, representing the postcolonial age, is representative of a marginal group, and as such, has benefitted from the material transmitted from the west. She borrows ideas from the west, and then presents them in her own cultural setting, in her context as Muslim woman in the twentieth century, living in a male dominated Muslim society.