Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist, and filmmaker whose work traverses the borders of Pakistan, her country of origin, and her adopted countries of India and the UK. "The right word,” originally published in Dharker's 2006 collection The terrorist at my table, explores the power of language on people's perception.
As if editing a film, Dharker presents different scenes of a situation where someone stands outside the door. With each new stanza, the context changes as a different word is used to describe the figure. The speaker progressively names the person as a terrorist, a freedom fighter, a hostile militant, a guerrilla warrior, a martyr, and finally, a child. The speaker invites the boy to come in and eat, and the boy carefully takes his shoes off at the door.
The terrorist at my table was well-received. The poems in the collection center on the fragility inherent to the normal routines and structures of life as people await an attack. This fragility can become violently unsettled, but it also helps form love and trust between people. In London Magazine, Alan Ross reviewed the collection: "Hers is a strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more effectively for their coolness of treatment." In Dharker's poem "The right word," the speaker invites "the terrorist" in to break bread with her, giving the poetry collection its name.
