Feminist Perspectives in the Poetry of Parveen Shakir

Abstract

Parveen Shakir has remarkably evolved the cult status in the annals of Modern Urdu poetry. She was a professor, poet, a journalist and a Pakistani beaurocrat. She is an indefatigable poet, who gives vociferously a vent to her own feelings, emotions, life experiences, and her relationship with her husband, and son in general and society in particular through poetry in an ebullient way. Her excellent and spectacular oeuvre includes Khushbu (Fragrance) (1976), Sad Barg (Marigold) (1980), Khud Kalami (Talking to self) (1981), Inkar (Denial)(1994), and Mahe- Tamam (Full Moon) (1980) et al. She left the world physically at the paltry age of forty two in an accident but her poetry still interests and intrigues readers across the globe irresistibly and incessantly. However, her poetry is out rightly subjective and is a serene stasis of her philosophy and life’s traumatic experiences. She is the voice of women in male dominated society. Love, loss, longing, female consciousness, atrocities on women, segregation in office and society , and other feminist issues, are dominant themes of her poetry Most of her poems explore nature of pangs of pain and sufferings, its hues, its impact on human soul, and its last inference . She wrote soaking her pen with the blood of her bruised soul, is perceptible in her works. The present paper, however, aims at probing the various feminist perspectives that her poetry explore to. The traumas, which the women undergo - depression, desperation, desertion, dejection, dementia, mental anguish etc. are discern in her work. We witness perpetual clash between her wish to live and to thwart the patriarchal forces and their menace against fair -sex in the entire gamut of her poetic output. Giant Pakistani literary luminary, Iftihar Arif is highly appreciative of Shakir for expressing “the young lot through her thematic variety and realistic poetry (blogspot.com, 3)