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“Honour Killing” Introduction
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Imtiaz Dharker wrote "Honour Killing" in response to the 1999 murder of Samia Imran, a Pakistani woman whose parents killed her to prevent her from divorcing her abusive husband. In this poem, a Pakistani woman imagines stripping away the oppressive aspects of her cultural background as if they were worn-out garments, beginning a new life for herself free of the weight of misogyny. Imagining a "new geography" for the women of the world, the poem suggests, means discarding cultural baggage and starting afresh, finding one's own identity beneath all the layers of cultural expectation and cruelty. Dharker collected this poem in her 2001 book I speak for the Devil.
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“Honour Killing” Summary
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The poem's speaker says that she's finally taking off the black coat of her nationality—a nationality she's felt identified with for years, though she feels this was more out of habit than intention. She was born wearing this coat, and didn't feel she had a choice about it.
She's removing the black veil of her religion—a religion that she feels made her betray herself. This veil stopped her from speaking out and made her god seem devilish to her.
She's removing her silky, lacy clothes—garments that only play into men's fantasies of power over women. She's removing the ceremonial wedding necklace and rings that she feels made her into a penniless beggar, robbed by someone else's needs.
She's removing her skin, her face, her body, and her uterus.
Now, she says, she wants to see what she really is beneath all these layers, when she leaves the cage of her own body behind.
Now she wants to know what she is when she's free of her old identity, free to design a whole new terrain for herself.
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“Honour Killing” Themes
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Women's Liberation, Identity, and Self-Discovery
Imtiaz Dharker wrote "Honour Killing" in the wake of the 1999 murder of a young Pakistani woman named Samia Imran. Imran was murdered by her own family, who were attempting to prevent her from divorcing her abusive husband (an unacceptable choice in their traditional, conservative worldview). This so-called "honor killing" sparked worldwide outrage. In this poem, a Pakistani woman commits an ironic "honor killing" of her own: she kills off all the misogynistic parts of her background that dishonor her true inner self. Through the speaker's quest to find out "what [she is] in here," what's really in her heart and soul, the poem suggests that developing a free and liberated life as a woman means doing the hard work of unearthing one's deepest essence, buried beneath all the world's sexist expectations.
This poem's speaker presents the damaging and repressive assumptions the world has imposed on her through the image of stripping off a series of metaphorical clothes. She begins with the "black coat" of her nationality, a garment she was "born wearing" and "believed [she] had no choice" but to wear forever.
Her realization that she doesn't have to feel burdened or trapped by her identity as a Pakistani woman leads her to rip off a lot of other metaphorical garments that she once felt she had no choice but to wear. She takes off the "black veil" of her Muslim faith, which she feels has "tied [her] mouth" and silenced her. She eschews the "silks" and "lacy things" of traditional femininity, which she declares only "feed dictator dreams," helping men to feel as if they have the right to dominate and use women. Finally, she imagines stripping away even her "skin," her "face," her "flesh," and her "womb": all the cultural pressure of having a female body.
It's only after she's torn all these layers away, she concludes, that she can "see / what [she is] in here," what she really is deep down. And it's only by seeing what she is that she can begin to imagine what she can do and be "out here," in the wider world. Liberated, she imagines "plotting / at [her] new geography," rebelliously remaking the world for herself and others like her.
The speaker's images of stripping away oppressive, inherited ideas about her identity suggests that many women labor under immense burdens of cultural misogyny. The way out of that trap involves some difficult, painful, but ultimately liberating self-examination—and a refusal to accept inherited, oppressive ideas about one's identity simply because one was "born wearing [them]."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-37
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Honour Killing”
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Lines 1-7
At last I’m ...
... had no choice."Honour Killing" begins with a burst of relief and anger. "At last," the poem's speaker cries, she's "taking off this coat, / this black coat of a country." She's shaking off her nationality as if it were a dark, oppressively hot garment.
This liberation, the poem suggests, was a long time coming. The speaker feels as if she never realized she could take off this heavy coat. "Born wearing it," she reflects, "I believed I had no choice." Once, then, she felt as if her nationality was a part of her she couldn't change, something innate to her. Now, she's seeing it in a new light: nationality has become an identity that she has a choice to wear, or not.
The poem's title gives some context to the speaker's decision to fling off her metaphorical "coat." Imtiaz Dharker wrote "Honour Killing" in response to the 1999 murder of Samia Imran:
- Imran was a young Pakistani woman who wanted to divorce her abusive husband. But in Imran's conservative, traditional family, divorce was taboo.
- Imran's own mother thus hired an assassin and led him to Imran's lawyer's office. The gunman murdered Imran and attempted to kill her lawyer.
- Imran's murder set off a wave of protest across Pakistan—particularly after courts waved this murder away as a so-called "honor killing" (the murder of a woman by her family members to preserve the family's reputation).
Dharker, who was born in Pakistan and raised mostly in Scotland, was one of many Pakistani women to feel deep rage and horror both at Imran's death and at the way the Pakistani government handled it. This poem's speaker will respond to the grim idea of "Honour Killing" with an ironic honor killing of her own. Responding to the misogynistic violence she feels is built into her culture, she will strip off all the layers of oppressive identity the world has imposed on her—killing these inherited ideas to defend her own honor, her own individual sense of self.
Dharker's poetry is often autobiographical, and here, readers might interpret the speaker as a version of Dharker herself: a Pakistani woman grappling with what the words "Pakistani" and "woman" mean to her.
She'll do so in Dharker's characteristic free verse. This poem uses a form of Dharker's own design, with no regular rhyme scheme or meter. But it's still intensely rhythmic and full of music. For instance, listen to the mixture of end rhymes and internal rhymes in lines 2-4:
this black coat of a country
that I swore for years was mine,
that I wore more out of habit
than design.All these chiming sounds make the speaker's voice feel intense, focused, and passionate.
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Lines 9-15
I’m taking off ...
... my own voice.
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Lines 17-22
I’m taking off ...
... that beggared me. -
Lines 24-26
I’m taking off ...
... the womb. -
Lines 28-31
Let’s see ...
... cage of bone. -
Lines 33-37
Let’s see ...
... my new geography.
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“Honour Killing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Parallelism
Intense parallelism helps to give this poem its powerful, uncompromising tone. Each of the first four stanzas starts with the same declaration:
At last I’m taking off this coat,
[...]
I’m taking off this veil,
[...]
I’m taking off these silks,
[...]
I’m taking off this skin,
These echoing words center the speaker's search for herself beneath layers and layers of imposed identities. As she removes the "coat" of nationality, the "veil" of religion, the "silks" of femininity, and finally the "skin" of womanhood itself, the parallel phrasing makes her sound bold and assured in her decision to discover who she really is beneath all that.
Dharker uses a similar effect in the phrasing of the rest of the stanzas. Take the repetitions in lines 1-4, for instance:
At last I’m taking off this coat,
this black coat of a country
that I swore for years was mine,
that I wore more out of habitFirst comes the intensifying parallelism of "this coat / this black coat," making it sound as if the speaker is examining the metaphorical coat she's rejecting with a critical eye. Then, the anaphora between "that I swore" and "that I wore" (highlighted by the swore / wore internal rhyme) makes the speaker's reflections feel punchy and energetic.
The first lines of the two closing stanzas mirror each other, too:
Let’s see
what I am in here[...]
Let’s see
what I am out here,Focusing this stanza on the speaker's curiosity about her most essential self, these lines also feel defiant. It's not just the speaker who will find out what she's made of, that repeated "let's" suggests, but the people around her—many of whom might prefer that she stay wrapped in all the cultural trappings she was born into.
Where parallelism appears in the poem:- Line 1: “I’m taking off this coat”
- Line 2: “this black coat”
- Line 3: “that I swore”
- Line 4: “that I wore”
- Line 9: “I’m taking off this veil”
- Line 10: “this black veil”
- Line 11: “that made”
- Line 13: “that tied”
- Line 17: “I’m taking off these silks”
- Line 18: “these lacy things”
- Line 24: “I’m taking off this skin”
- Line 28: “Let’s see”
- Line 29: “what I am”
- Line 33: “Let’s see”
- Line 34: “what I am”
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Metaphor
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Alliteration
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Irony
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“Honour Killing” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Muffled
- Mangalsutra
- Beggared
Muffled-
(Location in poem: Line 15: “muffled my own voice”)
Restrained; forcefully quieted.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Honour Killing”
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Form
"Honour Killing" is written in six irregular stanzas that range from three to seven lines long. Rather than choosing a traditional form here, Dharker (who has said that she "[doesn't] usually like very structured forms") uses flexible free verse, letting the poem shift its shape.
For instance, the first three stanzas all follow a similar pattern. In each, the speaker describes removing a metaphorical garment: the "black coat" of her nationality, the "black veil" of her religion, and the "silks" of traditional femininity. These stanzas are all roughly the same length, with six or seven lines describing the speaker rejecting elements of her identity that she feels are holding her back.
Then comes the fourth stanza. It starts out with a repeated first line that follows the pattern of the earlier stanzas ("I'm taking off this..."). But it's much shorter—just three lines long—and much blunter:
I’m taking off this skin,
and then the face, the flesh,
the womb.By cutting across the pattern she's developed, Dharker here lends extra force to the disturbing image of a woman stripping her whole body off—and thus, in context, to the idea that life in a female body often feels inescapably oppressive.
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Meter
"Honour Killing," like much of Imtiaz Dharker's work, is written in free verse. That means that there's no regular meter here. Instead, Dharker creates rhythm by playing with the lengths of lines and stanzas.
For instance, take a look at the way Dharker arranges the poem's shortest stanza, lines 21-23:
I’m taking off this skin,
and then the face, the flesh,
the womb.These three lines make the startling, terse image of a woman stripping her own body away stand out from a series of longer, more detailed stanzas. Dharker also gives the words "the womb" a line of their own. This choice highlights one of the central cultural assumptions the speaker is doing away with: the idea of herself as a woman who might be expected (or forced) to bear children.
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no consistent rhyme scheme in this free verse poem. However, Dharker does use flashes of rhyme and near-rhyme to highlight important moments in the poem.
In lines 2-5, for instance, the speaker describes removing
this black coat of a country
that I swore for years was mine,
that I wore more out of habit
than design.The end rhyme between "mine" and "design" and the internal rhyme between "swore," "wore," and "more" lends extra weight to the speaker's reflection that she accepted her nationality unintentionally, as something she was born with and had no say over.
Meanwhile, in lines 16-20, Dharker mixes rhyme with lots of assonance and alliteration:
these lacy things
that feed dictator dreams,
the mangalsutra and the rings
rattling in a tin cup of needs
that beggared me.In this passage, the speaker describes casting off the frilly trappings of stereotypical femininity, seeing them now as food for the "dictator dreams" of misogynistic men. All of the densely interwoven sounds here heighten her language, making this moment feel particularly intense.
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“Honour Killing” Speaker
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As in many of Dharker's poems, this speaker could easily be read as a voice for the author. Like Dharker, this speaker appears to have been born in Pakistan, and like Dharker, she's enraged at the misogyny she sees in her native culture. (The poem's title, "Honour Killing," refers to a crime in which family members murder their wives, sisters, or daughters when these women step out of line from traditional female roles.)
Imagining stripping away parts of her identity one by one—the "black coat" of her nationality, the "black veil" of her religion, the "lacy" underthings of traditional femininity—this poem's speaker pictures a world in which she can escape from all the repressive ideas that have been imposed on her from without. Inspired by anger, she's also motivated by the lure of freedom and possibility beyond other people's ideas about what she should be. She imagines herself free to get down to "making, / crafting, / plotting / at my new geography": to dreaming up a new world and a new identity of her own.
But there's also a darker possibility here. After casting aside nationality, religion, and femininity, this poem's speaker also decides to take off her body—"the face, the flesh, / the womb"—and escape the "easy cage of bone" that she lives in. These lines might also offer the possibility that the speaker is a victim of an "honor killing," a woman whose family has murdered her.
In this reading, the speaker's murder offers her a strange freedom to develop a "new geography," beyond the rules that bound her in life. That idea might suggest the way that injustice, horror, and tragedy can contain the seeds of their own destruction, spurring oppressed people to imagine new worlds for themselves. This very poem is an example of that process: Dharker wrote "Honour Killing" in response to the 1999 murder of Samia Imran, a murder that set off a wave of women's rights protests across Pakistan.
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“Honour Killing” Setting
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The poem never explicitly reveals its setting. But with a little background on what inspired Dharker to write this poem, readers might guess which "black coat" of a homeland the speaker is shaking off here. Dharker was born in Pakistan, and the terrible story that inspired her to write this poem happened in her native country: a young woman named Samia Imran was murdered by her own family in a so-called "honor killing" after she tried to divorce her abusive husband.
Further details in the poem also suggest that the speaker is coming to terms with a Pakistani background, including her rejection of the "black veil" of her faith (an allusion to the veil that many practicing Muslim Pakistani women wear over their heads or faces). Stripping herself of traditionally feminine trappings, she also removes a "mangalsutra," a kind of ceremonial necklace that Indian and Pakistani brides receive on their wedding days.
But the poem offers less of a sense of where the speaker stands now. And although she's speaking from a particular cultural context, discarding aspects of her Pakistani background that she has come to find oppressive and restrictive, she might be doing so from anywhere in the world. When she speaks of exploring a "new geography" beyond the culture she was born with, she hints that this fresh landscape might be discovered anywhere on the globe—anywhere that women reject the violence and repression that their cultures force on them.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Honour Killing”
Literary Context
Imtiaz Dharker is a British poet who was born in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan, in 1954. She grew up primarily in Glasgow, Scotland, where her family moved when she was one year old. Dharker studied at the University of Glasgow, graduating with an M.A. in English Literature and Philosophy. She has won many awards for her poetry, including a 2011 Cholmondeley Prize and a 2014 Queen's Gold Medal, and serves as a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Alongside her writing, Dharker works as an artist and a documentarian.
Dharker remembers the 19th-century English writer Gerard Manley Hopkins as the first poet who really spoke to her. But she draws on a wide and eclectic range of influences in her work. As she said in an interview: "Now, I can’t choose a favourite poet or poem. It changes every day—anything that knocks me out."
Dharker has published numerous books of verse, including the 2001 I speak for the Devil, in which this poem was first collected. Her poems often deal with questions of identity, home and exile, cultural displacement, and community.
Historical Context
Dharker wrote this poem after learning of the Pakistani government's muted response to the 1999 murder of a young woman named Samia Imran. Imran went to a lawyer to seek a divorce from her abusive husband. But in her traditional, conservative Pakistani family, divorce simply wasn't an option. Imran's own mother cornered her daughter in the lawyer's office and hired an assassin to shoot her. The assassin killed Imran and nearly killed her lawyer.
Dharker, like many people around the world, was appalled by this killing—and especially by the Pakistani government's failure to unequivocally condemn this murder. Some leaders waved Imran's death away as a so-called "honor killing": a kind of murder (almost always the murder of a woman) meant to preserve a family's reputation. In Pakistan alone, hundreds of women die at the hands of their own families every year.
After Imran was murdered, Pakistani women's and human rights organizations led a massive outcry against "honor killing." As the women's rights activist Asma Jahangir put it: "The courts condone this. This is a license to kill."
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More “Honour Killing” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Watch a video of Dharker performing the poem.
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Dharker's Website — Visit Dharker's personal website to learn more about her work.
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A Short Biography — Read the Poetry Archive's biography of Dharker.
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An Interview with Dharker — Read an interview in which Dharker discusses her poetic inspirations and process.
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The Poem's Tragic Inspiration — Read an article describing the event that inspired Dharker to write this poem: the 1999 death of Samia Imran, a Pakistani woman whose family murdered her in a so-called "honor killing" when she tried to get a divorce from her abusive husband.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Imtiaz Dharker
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