Honour Killing — Imtiaz Dharker
Honour Killing — Imtiaz Dharker
“Honour Killing” is a dramatic monologue in which an unnamed woman announces, layer by layer, that she is casting off everything that has defined her since birth — an extended metaphor of undressing that runs through the whole poem. The title primes us to expect violence, but the poem is not really about dying. It is about a woman refusing to be silenced, and choosing instead to remake herself.
The Poet and Her Context
Imtiaz Dharker has lived across Pakistani, Scottish and Indian cultures, and much of her poetry examines what it feels like to be handed an identity — a nationality, a faith, a set of expectations — rather than choosing one. “Honour Killing” grows directly out of that preoccupation: the poem’s speaker refuses the identities she was “born wearing” and claims the right to define herself instead.
An honour killing is a real and violent practice in which a family member is killed for supposedly bringing shame on the family, often a woman punished for choices about marriage or behaviour. Dharker’s title deliberately misleads: her poem is not a killing at all. It is a woman surviving by killing off the identities imposed on her, and reclaiming her own honour on her own terms.
Themes: Layers of Imposed Identity
The poem opens with the speaker “taking off this coat, / this black coat of a country / that I swore for years was mine.” A coat is worn on the outside, something you can choose to put on or take off — yet the speaker says she was “born wearing it” and “believed I had no choice.” The metaphor exposes nationality as something forced on a person at birth rather than freely chosen.
The second layer is religion: “this veil, / this black veil of a faith / that made me faithless / to myself.” The paradox matters — a faith that should offer comfort has instead made her “faithless” to her own needs, has “tied my mouth,” and even “gave my god a devil’s face.” Dharker suggests that religion imposed rather than chosen can silence rather than liberate; the faith “muffled my own voice.”
The third layer, “these silks, / these lacy things,” moves from faith to family and money. The reference to “the mangalsutra and the rings” — a sacred necklace tied by a husband at a Hindu wedding — ties the poem to marriage and dowry expectations. Dharker calls these gifts a “tin cup of needs / that beggared me”: objects that look precious but represent poverty of choice, silks and lace that “feed dictator dreams” that were never her own.
The final layer is the body itself: “this skin, / and then the face, the flesh, / the womb.” The poem moves from clothing and jewellery, which can be removed, to biology, which cannot — yet the speaker insists on stripping past even that, past “the easy cage of bone,” to ask “what I am in here.” The repeated command “Let’s see” marks a turn from destruction to discovery: having taken everything off, the speaker does not disappear. She finds herself “making, crafting, / plotting” a fresh existence at her own “new geography.”
The poem’s most exam-ready short quotations are “born wearing it,” “the easy cage of bone,” and the closing phrase “new geography” — each is short, exact, and captures a different stage of the poem’s argument.
Dharker repeats “I’m taking off” at the start of each new stanza, an example of anaphora that builds momentum, as though the speaker is working steadily through a checklist of everything imposed on her. The poem has no regular rhyme scheme and no fixed line length; short, blunt lines like “Let’s see” interrupt the longer descriptive lines, giving the poem the feel of someone thinking aloud rather than performing for an audience.
The turn from “I’m taking off” to “Let’s see” is structurally the most important shift in the poem. Frequent enjambment — sentences running on without pause, as in “then the face, the flesh, / the womb” — mimics the physical act of peeling back one layer to reveal another underneath. By the final stanza the destructive verb “taking off” has been replaced by active, creative verbs: “making, crafting, plotting.” Structure itself enacts the poem’s argument that losing an imposed identity can lead to self-invention.
Comparisons for the Exam
“Honour Killing” rewards comparison with several other poems in the Conflict cluster, because so many of them explore what happens when personal identity collides with inherited expectation, history or violence.
Colonization in Reverse (Bennett): Bennett reverses the history of empire with comic celebration, while Dharker’s speaker reverses her own personal history of imposed identity; both poems close by looking toward a transformed future — Bennett’s migrants who “tun history upside dung” and Dharker’s speaker claiming her own “new geography.”
Papa-T (D’Aguiar): D’Aguiar’s poem also interrogates the meaning of honour across generations: his grandfather’s “no-nonsense recitals” of an old poem demand obedience, a stern, protective version of family honour, whereas Dharker’s title exposes honour as a justification for violence against women — two very different meanings of the same word.
We Lived Happily during the War (Kaminsky): Kaminsky also builds pressure through repetition and short, urgent lines, but the effect differs: his repetitions accumulate guilt about inaction, while Dharker’s anaphora of “I’m taking off” drives toward liberation and self-assertion.
Thirteen (Femi): Femi shows prejudice narrowing a boy’s future before he has any say in it, while Dharker’s speaker actively reclaims control over her own future — a useful contrast between identity being taken away and identity being taken back.
Partition (Bhatt): Bhatt closes her poem with the speaker’s mother asking a furious question about the man who “knew nothing about geography” yet divided a country, while Dharker closes hers with the speaker’s own “new geography,” built for herself. Comparing the two final images shows two relationships with geography as a metaphor: one imposed by a distant authority, the other self-made.
This poem suits both parts of the poetry question. Its extended metaphor and controlled structure give plenty to discuss if it is printed as the named poem next to an unseen poem on identity or oppression, and its short, distinctive phrases — “new geography,” “tin cup of needs,” “cage of bone” — are easy to recall accurately if you choose to write about it from memory in the second part of the question.