THE IMPURE WOMAN (MARGINALITY AND DETACHMENT IN THE POETRY OF KISHWAR NAHEED)

Women are the hardest hit social group in Pakistan since last five decades. They are being marginalized at the very least and actually victimized in a worst case scenario in the name of Sharia laws. Over the ages women, along with other ethnic and religious groups, have been subjected to treatment that has induced doubt, confusion, cynicism, and despair among such abused groups. Kishwar Naheed is one of the foremost non-conformist feminist poets and women activists of Pakistan who actively participated in the agitations against state-dictated atrocities targeting women, and she wrote extensively about the rigid constraints on women of a political system imbued with farce religiosity and hypocrisy. While rejecting the all-male chauvinistic social order, despite the strong religious convictions of her countrymen, she struggled to redefine the status of women through her poetry. Her poetry has always been seen as a threat to the patriarchal order. Women in her poems become their own liberators and they crave and strive to break the rules and shed the shackles which imprison them; in her poems we see women trespassing the boundaries of marginality, soaring both high and to horizons heretofore forbidden them. This paper examines and questions the validity of laws, be they Sharia laws or social practices that dishonor women, and construes that both systems of justice marginalize and imprison women in their web of authoritarianism. It demonstrates how Kishwar Naheed, in writing poetry that consistently depicted woman as existing on the margins of their society, participated in their social rebirth.