Moniza Alvi and Representations of the Body

The few critics who write about the poetry of Moniza Alvi—a contemporary Pakistani-born British poet (b. 1954) who has not until now received the due critical attention she deserves—tend to focus on what seems to be the strongest aspect of her poetry, namely her use of the trope of the body as nation. Deryn Rees-Jones, for example, points out that by making the body as her country, Alvi “draws together the private and the domestic into the public and national realm” (207); Sarah Broom indicates that she uses the trope of body to probe the experience of identifying with “two different ethnic communities”—that of her Indian father and that of her English mother (48); Renata Senktas explains that Alvi uses the metaphor of the body to present different “landscapes and histories” that constitute who she is by making them “co-exist, in harmony or conflict . . .” (203). However, those critics miss other contexts in which the body figures: the body in situation, the body as a sign, and the body as a site of a place-torn identity. Building on some notions from largely Western philosophical, feminist, and geographical theories of the body, this essay examines those varieties of embodiment in her poetry. But before undertaking such an examination, it is important to situate Alvi in a historical and cultural context

Hispanic-African Historical Relations · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Mathematics

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