At the Time of

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.'

At the Time of Partition (extract 1)

1. The Line
A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak.

Not an artist’s line, or a line of writing.

A line between birth and non-being.

A line that would mean death for so many.

The land itself at its calmest and most dignified

yielded to the line, lay still –

it didn’t know what was coming.

India – and ‘Pakistan’:

the countries required their boundaries

as the thirsty needed water,

the beggars their begging bowls.

The line was its own religion,

it seemed to have its own God.

It sliced through a village, cut a house in half.

Where to place it in all of reality?
HOW THE STONE FOUND ITS VOICE
We had waited through so many lifetimes
for the stone to speak, wondered if

it would make compelling pronouncements,

anything worth writing down.

Then after the war of wars

had ground to a shattering halt, the stone

emitted a small grinding sound rather like

the clearing of a throat.

Let us be indifferent to indifference,

the stone said.

And then the world spoke.

DOORS
I observed that her knuckles were raw
with the effort of knocking on doors.

And if they opened she’d have difficulty

passing through – the awkwardness

of easing in with her world intact.

More than once I implored her to give up.

But I admired my wife, in a way –

the single-mindedness, her fierce pursuit.

She worked attentively, whenever she could,

at her listening skills, honing them

by day and night

 
FROM ‘AT THE TIME OF PARTITION’
Part 3: Better By Far

By bus?

Better by far a magic carpet,

finely knotted, richer

than blood, broad enough

to keep the family together,

islanded, apart
from every danger,

journeying swiftly
across the unsegmented sky –

not in the cauldron of summer,

but in the fresher feel

of the last of winter,

the lucid mornings,

the greeny tinge

of the evening air,

Nehru to wave them on

and Jinnah to welcome them –

my grandmother, her pots and pans,

her lamp close by,

her parcels of layered clothes,

like mattresses,

Ahmed and Athar jostling for space,

Rahila, Jamila, Shehana,

the ‘little’ sisters,

a conspiracy of three,

with names, like mine

all ending in ‘a’, young girls,

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 –

We’ll take him, Shakira.

He can travel with us.

You’ve enough on your hands

with the other four.

There are places still

on the second bus, inshallah!

At that swollen moment

there was a shadowy unburdening

because at that time, perhaps

any child was a burden.

How she would wish

as the weeks and the months

and the lifetimes churned on

to undo Take him,

to force back the heavy, rusted

hands of the clock –

God’s clock held by God’s hands

in permanent view.

Say your goodbyes, ticked the clock.

No time to lose.

But who was left for goodbyes –

her Hindu friends, the friends of friends?

A stream drying up.

How to say it?

It was hard to sit on a cane-seated chair

on her old verandah and sip tea,
the conversation curdling
like milk for the weekly paneer.

Tomorrow we will be gone.

The risk of departingu

an island in the deafening, tumultuous sea.

She was married to its daily rhythms –

the kneading, the sweeping, the praying . . .

Under duress,
it was dauntingly calm.

And Ludhiana itself, the Old City

and the New –

the Civil Lines with their flowering trees.

The Christian Medical Hospital.

The cloth factories and the temples.

The neighbourliness of the lanes. Her lanes.

Bleeding internally, the city

tried to appear whole

for a final goodbye –

as, they would gather and wait

appear whole

under Hindu sun and Moslem rain

Hindu rain and Moslem sun.

Nothing was wrong with the clock.

The clock ticked on.
Moniza Alvi
(Pakistan, 1954) 
 
Tuesday 1 November 2011

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:

Climb onto his back,

the air seemed to say.
Cling to his broad white neck.
He bowed low, beckoning her
with half-knowing looks,
and she clambered up the milky hill of him
until they were one –
Europa and the bull, motionless
for an instant, answerable
to the sea and sky.

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

Bibliography

Peacock Luggage, with Peter Daniels, Sheffield, Smith/Doorstop, 1992

The Country at My Shoulder, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993
A Bowl of Warm Air, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996
Carrying My Wife, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2000
Souls, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2002
How the Stone Found its Voice, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2005
Europa, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2008
Split World: Poetry 1990–2005, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2008
Homesick for the Earth: Poems by Jules Supervielle with versions by Moniza Alvi, Tarset,
Bloodaxe, 2011

Links

Moniza Alvi’s poetry is published by Bloodaxe 

Alvi’s website 
Reviews of How the Stone Found its Voice  and Europa 
Alvi’s poem on Samuel Palmer’s painting Coming from Church, published by TATE ETC. 
Alvi’s profile on the British Council website 
Read more about Alvi’s poem ‘Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan’ on the  BBC Schools
website  (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/clips/zc7b4wx)

related items
articles

 Editorial: 1 November 2011

This book-length poem is set at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan
in 1947 when thousands of people were killed in civil unrest and millions
displaced, with families later split between the two countries. Inspired by
family history, Moniza Alvi weaves a deeply personal story of fortitude and
courage, as well as of tragic loss, in this powerful work in 20 parts. At the
Time of Partition is Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot
Prize-shortlisted collection Europa, published in 2008 at the same time as
Split World: Poems 1990-2005. 'Alvi...takes a historical journey as the
structure for this narrative poem. The year is 1947 -the year of Partition -and a
family is forced to leave their home in Ludhiana for Lahore...Alvi captures the
trauma of a nation in this slim, exquisitely mournful story of departure,
migration and the uncertain feelings of settling in a new country...' - Arifa
Akbar, Independent. 'The volume consists of 20 poems which flow into each
other to create a single haunting and lyrical narrative, welding the personal
and the public. The result is a stunning, skilled and controlled work of
immense grandeur...At the Time of Partition is a truly extraordinary collection,
a work which succeeds in being spare, compelling and timeless. Furthermore,
for the subcontinental reader, it captures a moment of time, a memory, so
visceral that it has an extraordinary power. This book should not be missed.' -
Moneeza Shamsie, Dawn (Pakistan). Shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Eliot Prize,
Poetry Book Society Choice.

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.