sibilance of this line creates a subversive voice speaking out from the consuming and repeated ‘ silence .’ Similarly , Arshi explores this internalised silence so instrumental in the destruction of the female voice , describing how the unidentified ‘ girls ’ in her poem ‘ fill our pocket mouths defenceless in the darkness ’ ( p6 ). These girls are reduced to vessels , their mouths described as ‘ pocket [ s ]’ passively containing the ‘ soil ’ ( p5 ) of the poem ’ s setting – internalizing and physically ingesting the destructive ‘ darkness ’ that surrounds them . They utter only ‘ A gentle murmured refrain like old rain , / snowflakes again we answer to the darkness ’ ( pp7-8 ). The refrain of the Ghazal becomes the echoed reverberations of the girls , reduced to a ‘ gentle murmur ’, likened to the dismal inconsequence of ‘ old rain .’ Their volume on par with the noiselessness of ‘ snowflakes ’, they only passively ‘ answer ’ to darkness , never questioning or speaking out of this destructive monotony . This muffled suppression is also presented by Rich , who emphasises the difficulty the female speaker endures in getting her voice heard , internalising this silence , articulating it as ‘ an underground river / forcing its way between deformed cliffs ’ ( pp3-4 ). The power and vitality of the water is
ENGL347 Women Writers
13 hidden among the underground darkness , having to ‘ force ’ its way through a ravaged landscape of ‘ deformed ’ rocks . Yet force she does , ‘ testing ’ ( p39 ) herself and her own voice to be heard amidst the destructive monotony of a hostile external environment .
Arshi also investigates the relationship between silence and destruction through her subversion of the Ghazal ’ s traditional form . Ward explains how typically , the poet ’ s name ‘ haunts the [ Ghazal ] poem , lingers within it . [...] For the poet , this formal stipulation encourages inhabiting imagination to return to the self , to place oneself ( as oneself ) into the thick of things . The poet must imagine [...] herself in the poem .’ But Arshi deliberately rejects this , instead replacing her name with ‘ shabash ’ ( a praise of achievement in India ) in the final line ‘ Shabash I call to my girls , my praise in the darkness ’ ( p16 ). This provides the only audible exclamation in the whole poem , juxtaposing the girls who are ‘ distracted and starved ’ ( p13 ) from their own narrative voices . Like Rich , Arshi examines the power to construct and deconstruct narrative . Therefore , this removal of the self within her narrative actually juxtaposes the power she yields to deliberately