Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker

HYWEL DIX, Bournemouth Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker

According to the biographical note printed inside the front cover of Imtiaz Dharker's fourth volume of poetry, Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between Mumbai, London and Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary filmmaker and has published four collections with Bloodaxe in Britain. From the beginning, it appears that Dharker situates her work within a number of different poetic traditions. By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American. Moreover, in addition to situating herself within and between these myriad different national communities, Dharker's work draws also on the cultural resources available in other kinds of community. The community of feminism is one example of this. Communities of language and of religion, communities of writers and of readers, of work and friendship and family are all further examples. This paper will argue that the entanglement both with different national communities and other kinds of affiliations constitutes in Dharker's work a poetic self whose vision and perspective is transnational in scope. This in turn has the effect of promoting in her work a rethinking of traditional notions of nationhood (i.e. Britishness) and belonging in favour of elected transnational affinities. In other words, the nation is defined in her work by its complex relationship to other communities, as the fundamental condition of its existence.

Pluralising Cultural Identity In a leading study of cultural practices in Wales since devolution in 1997, Heike Roms has suggested that before Wales gained a degree of political self-rule its writers often subscribed to a putative 'nationalist' model, whereas more recent Welsh writers have become increasingly concerned with the cultural politics of civic – as opposed to nationalist – relationships (Roms 2004). Robert Crawford has similarly said that in the years since the Scottish people embraced the principle of self-rule in the 1997 referendum, Scotland has become increasingly confident in articulating a multi- cultural identity based on the participation of its members in the processes of civil society rather than on ethnic exclusivity. Scottish literature, he suggests, has become more comfortable articulating "a pluralism appropriate to a modern nation" without "abandoning ideals of independence" (Crawford 2014, 171). He enthusiastically echoes Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's assertion that "Scotland belongs to all who choose to call it home" (Crawford 2014, 182). Dharker's work throws up a number of complexities in that gesture of symbolic identification. It is true that she has chosen at times to make Scotland her home so that

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.1 (March 2015): 55-67.

she can be seen as a Scottish writer in Crawford and Salmond's sense. On the other hand, her work is situated within a number of literary, cultural and geographic relationships that are consciously transnational in scope, so that in effect she is a writer who is sometimes Scottish, sometimes Welsh, sometimes British, sometimes Lahori and sometimes from Mumbai. There is a basic and perhaps deliberate instability in her work between Dharker as a British and as an Indian or Pakistani writer, and this instability seems to run right through her work rather than her moving simply from one to the other in a fairly linear way. Related to that, her oeuvre as a whole raises all sorts of questions about what is meant by a British writer in the first place. Is she a British writer full stop? Indo-British? Scottish? Scottish and British? British because both sometimes Scottish and sometimes Welsh? Again, all the different and complex strands can be found throughout her work, generating a sense not so much of transition from one to another, but of continuous interplay between different elements. Perhaps as part of this questioning, in Leaving Fingerprints Dharker makes use of a number of metaphors for exposing the hollowness of notions of cultural identity based on ethnicity and in particular on racial purity. Fingerprints are used throughout the collection as a metaphor for the conflict between a biologically determined sense of culture and belonging, and the idea of elective affinity expressed by the things we Winter Journals pick up, put down and leave behind. From the discrepancy and dialogue between the two arises a powerful metaphor for the mingling of cultures constantly being replanted, recreated and renewed. This implies not only that Dharker's concept of a national community is fluid rather than static, but also that it is multiple rather than singular. She does not see the need to choose definitively between the different communities of which she is a part and instead allows the fact of belonging to each to for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution revitalise all. In a series of poems in Leaving Fingerprints, Dharker launches a poetic investigation into the status of the Battle of Hastings and the foundational moment of

the Norman Conquest in English history – before portrayingPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) modern Hastings as a place of endlessly deferred meaning rather than a site of static cultural origin. Since Dharker sees cultural identity as both transnational and consciously elected, she is interested in exploring what it could mean to suggest that the Norman Conquest represents the moment of foundation of a culture which in her imagination is imagined differently. The significance of Dharker's historical imagining of national identity lies not in what it has included historically in the past, but in what it might prospectively include in the future. For example, the poem "How it started" is subtitled "In Hastings Museum," and the sense of origins implied by the verb "started," coupled with the highly resonant place name, creates an expectation that the poem will somehow be about a historical period that is often taken to be foundational in English (and by extrapolation, British) history. This expectation is then fulfilled by the poem in ironic and unexpected ways: It must have started with shells picked up on the beach, the rumour of a huge world in your small pink ear. You reached out across the seas and continents, brought back the sounds of being born and dying,

eating, drinking, celebrating, praying, war-drums beating, anklets singing,

all of life like shells, still trailing sand, collected in your busy hands. And now you hold them up to let me hear a whole world roaring in my ear. (Dharker 2009, 24) The opening image of a child collecting shells on a beach moves the poem in a different direction from that implied by the title and the location, suggesting that rather than being 'about' the history of the nation, the poem represents the coming into being of an individual whose life story is retrospectively inserted into that historical narrative. That is, the poem subverts the expectation established by its own title by placing it in dialogue with ideas of origins and belonging on a more personal level. In turn, this dialogue creates a sense of interplay between the historically given event of national foundation and the historically provisional and unstable process whereby Dharker attempts to situate her poetic self within that history. Bringing that dominant reference point into dialogue with a series of poetic, provisional and shifting reference points for the origin of the individual has the effect of rendering each relative to the other, and hence of de-privileging the foundational status of the former. In this way, Dharker appropriates the past as a way of inserting her poetic self into a reworked narrative of community, for which the capacity to relate to different global communities simultaneously is a pre-condition. Her addressee in "How it started" is a poetic 'you' reaching out across seas and continents, reminding us that the main protagonists in 1066 were themselves incomers from elsewhere, so that in the present, too, it is retrospectively possible for that 'you' to speak across the centuries and suggest a sense of belonging for the 'I' of the poem based ironically on the same principle of arrival from across the sea.

Belonging beyond the Nation-State In the poem, the sea itself is endowed with an amniotic quality, a metaphor made more explicit by the imagery of birth and death, which together with the shells of the opening line might call to mind a masterpiece of renaissance art, Botticelli's Birth of Venus. That painting is often taken as representing a key moment in the birth of the Italian artistic tradition – but it dates from a period in history before there was any meaningful Italian state as such. In other words, it too symbolises Dharker's poetic critique of national origins. Botticelli has been taken to have portrayed the birth not just of a goddess but of a whole national culture to which at the time he did not in fact belong, just as the Battle of Hastings has been seen retrospectively as representing the foundational moment of the Anglo-British nation whereas at the time it represented something entirely different: an encounter between different cultures. Although the poem calls to mind the Birth of Venus, Dharker places a very different illustration next to it, thereby complicating the reading of the poem (fig. 1). It is a landscape, in which the trees are made up of leaves and branches resembling fingerprints growing in a field of words. Their tangled underground roots are deep and intertwined, seeming to flow like blood vessels. Words, language, blood, and fingerprints are all powerful metaphors for ideas of cultural belonging. But as we have seen, the poem that they accompany performs a profound poetic critique of the

idea of a community based on dubious origins or indeed on blood. In other words, the picture does not illustrate the contents of the poem in any straightforward way. In a study of the poetry and illustrations of Stevie Smith, Laura Severin has argued that the twin elements should be seen as two halves of a composite art form in which the visual element does not repeat or reinforce what is expressed in the verbal element, but actively cuts against and contradicts it, creating a sense of dialogism and radical instability. This relates directly to Smith's feminist practice because, by refusing to illustrate the poetic narrative, the use of illustrations "begins to question and undermine other, more dominant discourses in the culture, particularly those maintaining traditional hierarchic distinctions of class, gender, and national origin or ethnic background" (Severin 1997, 50). Dharker's illustrations too can be seen as a composite art form because they provide ironic contrapuntal commentary on the poetry and create a dialogue between the hegemonic image of birth as metaphor for cultural origins, and a powerful image of re-birth, growth, and change. The paratextual elements that surround Dharker's work are important because they enable her to distribute poetic authority among several different poetic functions. The subtitle "In Hastings Museum" lays down one governing set of expectations, which are disrupted by the speaking 'I' of the poem, who deconstructs the assumptions of that initial authority in a series of images that call to mind a third source of cultural authority, Botticelli, before moving on to an entirely different visual image again. Each of the elements of the poem bristles with the authority of the others without any being granted dominant status so that the poem submits its poetic self and the culture it represents to a continual process of un- and re-making. This sense of dialogic process enables the poem to overflow its own boundaries, which is emblematic of the cultural work that it performs. This is typical of Dharker's work as a whole, continually crossing national, cultural, linguistic and artistic borders to reveal the different kinds of community to which the individual relates. Thus, her poetry is not merely a celebration of the coexistence of different global communities but an assertion of the points of intersection between them as the fundamental condition of any notion of community. This interplay between different national affiliations and other kinds of community is developed into a metaphysical relationship to language and writing in the poem "Left": It was left on a pillowcase and a photo-frame, on the aisle seat and the handrail and the page of a book and a window-pane.

It might be a hint or a clue or a last attempt at a smile, the ghost of a leaf or a blot or a stain or the poem I almost wrote in my sleep

when my lost alphabet found the earth and planted itself. It was left, not growing but waiting, never explained. (Dharker 2009, 89) The poem opens with a series of metaphors for a life lived in transit. But if these symbols for international travel are recognisable and tangible, the subject of the poem

is less concrete. The hints, the smiles, the ghosts blur impressionistically into each other in a very complex clause structure that lacks final resolution. At the end of the poem, what has been left appears both to be the speaking persona's language as symbolised by the lost alphabet and something expressed in that language: the almost written poem, dating from the time when the lost alphabet took root and started to grow elsewhere. Dharker's "not growing but waiting" can be read as a reconfiguration of Stevie Smith's ironic poem "Not waving but drowning" (Smith 1975, 303). Smith is clearly important to Dharker as a feminist predecessor and, as Laura Severin has shown, Smith pioneered the use of contrapuntal illustration to contradict or pull against the themes of the poems – which we also find in Dharker's work. The drawing that accompanies "Left" does not illustrate the hotels or airports or planes described in the poem. Instead, it depicts a different kind of poetic landscape comprising only trees and a rolling hillside in which both the branches and the contours of the ground resemble fingerprints and so reveal the hand of the poet in a landscape which would otherwise bear no trace of her (fig. 2). Thus "Left" takes to a further level the cultural work that had already been performed in "How it started." Consistent with Dharker's poetic refusal to recognise the authoritative account of cultural origins, she alters the values implied in Smith's "Not waving but drowning" in order to bespeak a broader defiance of the idea of determinate cultural pioneers. While Stevie Smith's work remains a crucial point of reference for Dharker, it is equally important that Dharker supersedes her. Thus as a female writer there is much to interest Dharker in Smith's work, but none of the global, multi-cultural complexity that Dharker herself adds to it. Moreover, "Not waving but drowning" is a poem symbolising the exhausting process of a woman worn down through a lifetime's struggle against patriarchy and eventually surrendering to it. Dharker, by contrast, has no interest in surrendering. As a result, her poetic self is expressed in language that at the end of the poem refuses to explain or justify its own presence in the landscape. The poem seems to say that the language, like the trees, has been transplanted and belongs. The capacity to use one form of community (defined in this case by a language) to enlarge conventional understanding of another form (in this case, a national community) is important to Dharker because it reveals that multiplicity and the space for active affiliations it opens up is the defining element for her understanding of the overall concept of community.

Commonalities and the Politics of Desire In a comparative study of women's writing in Wales and Ireland, Linden Peach has argued that contemporary literature is necessarily situated both within and between a whole series of regional, national and transnational cultural histories. His point is not simply that the intersection between these different cultures is a descriptive feature of contemporary literary cultures, but that it also provides an opportunity for cultural renewal because it "triggers an interest in reading cultural and literary histories within this framework" (Peach 2007, 11). This in turn leads him to suggest that despite important cultural differences between the cultural histories of Wales and Ireland there are certain recurring patterns of female activity that are common to those different cultures and hence enable the women writers of each to say something germane to the lives and work of the others. Such writing, he concludes, is grounded

in a powerful dialectical relationship expressing simultaneously the recognition of cultural authorities and the desire to confront and contest them in a way that continually traverses and displaces national, cultural, and generic boundaries in order to subvert them. This is what happens in Dharker's work, existing as we have seen between Britain and Pakistan, Scotland and Wales. Starting often in physical spaces that have been associated with female activity, she frequently goes on to use that activity itself to open up a new perspective on the politics of desire. This new perspective itself is generated by the interplay between a sense of difference between the many global communities she inhabits and a parallel sense of what those cultures – and what the women from those cultures – have in common. Her poem "Don't" employs a similar controlling metaphor to that implied by the illustration accompanying "Left." That is a metaphor of plants that have been transplanted into a new landscape, superseding notions of native or indigenous varieties with a sense of how those plants flourish in and contribute to the landscape of the new world. In "Don't" the metaphor goes in a different direction, supplementing the image of cultural transplantation with a stronger feeling of female desire: Don't bring me mangoes or guavas or figs in your suitcase from Lahore, she said. Bring me instead from the giant tree on the magic continent the plump jamun fruit with the bloom of longing on the skin.

Be sure to get there before the thieving Parakeets. Under the tree spread out white sheets. Take a long stick and tap at a branch to surprise the fruit out of the tree. It will shower down, waterfall, fruitfall, on the shock of sheets that will turn purple with love.

Bring it to me, she said. The weight and shine of it, the bite of love's wound.

The bite. Fly with it, take it to her. Give it a colour, give her a tongue, she speaks purple, laughs purple, spits out purple pits. She abandons words, hung in sharp air as a parakeet, keen and there. (Dharker 2009, 87) Unlike "How it started," here Dharker uses a third person poetic narrator to portray the desiring female subject. The ripe fruits with their longing skin and purple juice are perhaps conventional symbols for sexual desire but they are conventional in another sense also: in an age characterised in the West by consumer cultures on a planetary scale, the mango and the guava are both recognisable fruits on the supermarket shelves. That is, they have lost their sense of exoticism and are not novel. This might be seen as suggesting a desire on the part of Dharker's poetic self to become similarly de-exoticised and hence to say something profoundly normative

about the nature of immigrant experience – which could go all the way back to her representation of the Battle of Hastings. On the other hand though, this de-exoticising tendency could also have the effect of rendering its subject invisible, an effect which Dharker's poetic self is anxious to avoid. Therefore, there is also a competing impulse at work in the poem, not simply to be accommodated and de-exoticised but consciously to register and enact the experience of the new and of the unfamiliar. For this reason, the desiring female of "Don't" instructs her lover travelling back to Europe from Lahore to bring back a much less conventional fruit: the jamun. Just as the mango and guava are symbols for a poetic articulation of de-estrangement, so too this newly revitalised fruit, much less familiar to a Western consumer, undercuts those images by mobilising a contrary imaginary of re-estrangement. Caught in this matrix between competing impulses for the de-/re-exoticised and de-/re-estranged, "Don't" uses the fruits as conventional images for female desire and elevates this into a broader principle in which desire is expressed as the desire to be recognised as a complex human subject capable of speaking from a range of different subject positions, within and between a number of different communities. Just as "How it started" invokes the image of Botticelli's Venus only to veer away from it, so too "Don't" hints at another major work of European cultural history, Rossini's Thieving Magpie, only to transmute it into a "thieving parakeet," a bird indigenous to a different continent yet also familiar in the twenty-first century in Britain. In this way, as with the earlier poem, sources of cultural authority are both invoked and wilfully mis- recognised as such. This again has the effect of critiquing constructions of a national community based purely on concepts of native space, and develops an alternative notion by revealing that communities themselves are plural and mutually enriching.

The Interrogation of Cultural Origins The interplay between impulses to de-/re-exoticise is a major element in the complex poem sequence "Remember Andalus" from Dharker's third collection The terrorist at my table (2006). Andalusia is important to Dharker because it represents a place and a time when European and Moorish cultures met. In her poetic imagination, the meaning of that meeting is not fixed in time: it has constantly to be re-renewed. In "Alif, Anar" a pomegranate is given as a gift in a Glasgow household – its strangeness a comment on cultural diversity – while in "How to cut a pomegranate" the fruit reminds the poet that "somewhere I had another home" (Dharker 2006, 66). The seeds of the fruit are again important in "The Women" because it is out of sown seeds that different women grow. This image of seeds giving birth to human beings alludes to the ancient Greek myth of Cadmus, in which Cadmus sowed the teeth of a dragon he had slain and from those teeth a new race of Theban warriors was born. As with the Battle of Hastings and the Birth of Venus, though, Dharker does not merely invoke a prior historical event as evidence of the fixity of cultural origins. On the contrary, her point is to interrogate the notion of cultural origins itself. For this reason, her allusion to the myth of Cadmus reminds us that although ancient Greek culture has often been co-opted into a linear history of European civilisation, that same Greek culture was also a part of Middle Eastern and Asian societies in its own period. Whereas the myth of Cadmus is about the birth of a race of warrior men, Dharker's inflection of that

myth gives rise to an image of the birth of peace-loving women in different global cultures around the world. It is significant that "Remember Andalus" is prefaced with an epigram taken from Edward Said: "Culture is a form of memory against effacement" (qtd. in Dharker 2006, i). In Beginnings, Said made an important distinction between what he called "filial" relations (1997, 66), and a different concept of productive textual networks based on what he called conscious "affiliation" (1997, 365). He used the term "filial" relations between texts and their producers to refer to an idea of cultural purity and of a static, timeless European culture handed down unchangingly from generation to generation over centuries. By contrast, his notion of "affiliation" interrupts this straightforward handing down of a static and unchanging culture, revealing cultural identities themselves to be amenable to intervention, recreation and elective insertion, and hence unlocks the binary thinking and cultural hierarchies that characterised the period of European empires. Dharker's poems, and especially the sequence "Remember Andalus," represent a shift away from "filial" relations based on a spurious notion of cultural purity to one of consciously chosen affiliation. This affiliation is often expressed in the different roles played by women of different cultures, as in the title poem from The terrorist at my table:

I slice sentences to turn them into onions. On this chopping board, they seem more organised, as if with a little effort I could begin to understand their shape.

At my back, the news is the same as usual. A train blown up, hostages taken. Outside, in Pollokshields, the rain…

Here is the food. I put it on the table. The tablecloth is fine cutwork, sent from home. Beneath it, Gaza is a spreading watermark. (Dharker 2006, 22)

"The terrorist at my table" involves a life and death conceit relating the details of a female domestic interior to the process of creating poetry and to a critical reading of Middle Eastern politics. The poem is based on the interplay between the twin impulses to mourn the losses of a past full of conflict and to create something new without being caught in either nostalgia or the politics of blame:

Here are the facts, fine as onion rings. The same ones can come chopped or sliced.

Shoes, kitchens, onions can be left behind, but at a price. Knowledge is something you can choose to give away, but giving and taking leave a stain.

Who gave the gift of Palestine?

Cut this. Chop this, this delicate thing haloed in onion skin.

Your generosity turns my hands to knives, the tablecloth to fire.

Outside, on the face of Jerusalem, I feel the rain. (Dharker 2006, 23)

Having heard news of a terrorist attack in her kitchen in Scotland, the woman reflects that certain things are left behind in the aftermath of such an attack – things like shoes and chopped onions. The onion she chops is likely to remind us that onion skin is a material used in the printing and publishing industry on the one hand, and that onions cause tears on the other. In other words, with the news of the attack the poem comes full circle, bringing the poet the pain that brings her life, expressing simultaneously the conflicting impulses towards creativity and memorialisation. The poem's profoundly ironic title therefore reveals the terrorist at the table to be Dharker's own poetic self, engaged in an act of creative vandalism that will force readers to acknowledge the presence of the poet in the poetry and in the wider community to which it relates through conscious affiliation rather than through birthright. The onion in this sense is another example of the cultural work symbolised by the jamun and the pomegranate: a refusal to be rendered invisible and a comparable insistence on the positive contributions different global cultures make to each other. One final example of the interplay between de- and re-exoticisation in The terrorist at my table is the poem "Out of Place." It is dedicated "For Sally, Tŷ Newydd" in a gesture towards Sally Baker, Director of the National Writers' Centre of Wales, and here at last there seems to be an acknowledgement of Dharker's affiliation as a Welsh writer. This is somewhat confirmed by the content of the poem, but in unexpected and perhaps even paradoxical ways:

The wind swept her towards us, unwrapped from fields, and over her shoulder the busy Criccieth sea, holding not the flowers or shells we might expect to see, but this, an onion.

Shining, bursting out of its gold papery skin, mysterious thing.

she shifted it to her left hand, shook ours, looked at it, as if she had surprised herself.

'How absurd,' she said. 'An onion. A phone call from my father. He needed one.'

'My father too,' I almost say, even though he is four thousand miles away.

'First,' my mother always said, 'Fry onions. The smell of it will bring them in.' The family drawn like fish to the big table.

Somewhere, in his empty house, the phone rings.

In her hands, my gift to him. (Dharker 2006, 117)

As with "The terrorist at my table" we note the metaphorical association between the onion, with its papery skin, and the work of the writer whose painful job it is to fill that paper. In "Out of Place" Dharker mobilises a portrayal of the different roles played by women in different kinds of community (mother, daughter, lover, friend) in a highly suggestive way. To play these roles, the poem suggests, is also to pass on language through culture and hence to create poetry. The speaking persona consciously rejects the use of flowers as a conventional symbol of female subjectivity and instead embraces the much more humble onion. In other words, it performs the simultaneous gestures of incorporation and ex-centricity that were conveyed in the other poems through the symbols of the de-exoticised guavas and mangoes and the re- exoticised jamuns and pomegranates. In "Don't" these twin impulses were associated with a physical journey between Lahore and an unspecified generic Western location, implicitly Britain. In "The terrorist at my table" the reverse was true: a highly specified Scottish location was placed in a dialogic relationship to a more generalised Asia. Here, Dharker creates a further variation on the same general theme, not now about Britain and Lahore, or Scotland and Asia but about Wales and Pakistan. But really, of course, "Out of Place" is no more 'about' being in Wales than "Don't" was 'about' being in Britain. The real cultural work performed by the poems is the use of the symbols of the fruits to suggest an interplay between the familiar (which can also be the invisible) and the strange (which can also be the new). If the locations seem interchangeable this is not because they are not important to Dharker but because she is interested both in the recurring kinds of experience that take place when different cultures come into contact and in how all of those diverse experiences comprise different aspects of the poetic self. In other words, whatever community Dharker imagines herself belonging to at a local level, it is always defined by the multiple entanglement with other communities and other cultures. In this sense, "Out of Place" tells us explicitly what we already know from the other poems: that Dharker's concept of community cannot be exclusive because she considers herself a Scottish writer and a Welsh writer and a British writer and an Indian writer and a Pakistani writer. She makes this commitment to a transnational community manifest primarily through her writing and her elected

affinities, which are multiple. At the same time, she draws on the cultural strengths not only of different national traditions around the world but also of different kinds of community in specific and varying ways at different times. In other words, a greater sense of cultural and political independence in Scotland and Wales has brought with it a greater sense also of their complex interaction with other cultures and other traditions,traditions, helpinghelping inin turnturn toto shapeshape aa newnew concept of community inin eacheach case.case.

Fig. 1. Illustration to the poem "How it started" from Leaving Fingerprints (2009), 25.

Fig. 2. Illustration to the poem "Left" from Leaving Fingerprints (2009), 88.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bloodaxe Books for their kind permission to reprint the two illustrations from Imtiaz Dharker's Leaving Fingerprints (2009, 25 and 88) and for permission to quote the poems "The terrorist at my table" and "Out of place" from the collection The terrorist at my table (2006) as well as "How it started, " "Left" and "Don't" from Leaving Fingerprints.

Works Cited Crawford, Robert. Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Dharker, Imtiaz. The terrorist at my table. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006. —. Leaving Fingerprints. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009. Peach, Linden. Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Roms, Heike. "Performing Polis: Theatre, Nationness and Civic Identity in Post- Devolution Wales." Studies in Theatre and Performance 24.3 (2004): 177-192. Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. London: Granta, 1997. Severin, Laura. Stevie Smith's Resistant Antics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Smith, Stevie. The Collected Poems. London: Viking, 1975.