A woman takes off, one by one, the coat of her country, the veil of her faith, the silks and jewels of marriage and even her skin, to find out who she is without them and to plot a new life of her own.
How Dharker's repeated I'm taking off, extended metaphors of clothing and of drawing a new map, short lines and a hopeful ending present a woman's conflict with the roles forced on her, and how the title's meaning is turned around.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'made me faithless', 'tied my mouth', 'dictator dreams', 'beggared me', 'new geography'.
Form: free verse in short stanzas of short, indented lines, built on the repeated I'm taking off, then two stanzas opening Let's see that look inward and outward, ending on the making of a new map.
Context: Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954), who grew up in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales, a poet and artist awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2014; I Speak for the Devil (2001), poems of a woman's body as a territory owned by herself or by others, with a sequence that opens with a striptease casting off the claims of nationality, religion and gender; and the title's play on honour killings, murders committed in the name of a family's honour.
Links within the cluster: Partition (a new geography against a man who knew nothing about geography), Envy (finding your own worth), Thirteen (prejudice and its consequences) and There’s a Certain Slant of Light (a conflict inside the self).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a woman breaking free of others' expectations, identity, or clothing and the body as images of who we are.
Examiners in 2023 saw it read as a bold refusal of what others expected of the speaker, with pity for what she had suffered; OCR's mark schemes pick out how the images of taking off clothes and drawing a new map carry her inner struggle.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
