Women of substance

Three women, three writers, three very different life experiences. On Monday afternoon the artist Fiona Graham-Mackay introduced us to Imtiaz Dharker, whose portrait she has been painting. While she attempts to capture a visual impression, Imtiaz, who is a poet, tells us what it feels like to be the sitter, the one who is being looked at, drawn, observed with such sharp-eyed scrutiny. A Portrait of… on Radio 4 was one of those seductive programmes that draws you in simply by the quality of the voices and the clear-sighted honesty of what they’re saying. What would it feel like to be painted, and then see yourself as someone else has drawn you? How does the artist know where to begin? With the eyes, the mouth, a first impression?

Dharker was born in Pakistan but grew up in Glasgow in a strict family where rules were made and where she always felt in some way constrained (she describes herself as ‘a Scottish Muslim Calvinist’). As an adult she has always been determined ‘not to be held in’, to be as free as possible in her thinking. Her poems are about cultural intolerance, gender politics, freedom. She was concerned that in allowing herself to be painted, she would somehow be pinned down, like a butterfly, no longer free to change, to reshape and be reshaped. Meanwhile we could hear Graham-Mackay scratching on paper with a stick of charcoal, her preferred way of beginning (‘I love its fluidity’) as she works out how to make sense of the complex woman in front of her.

This was ‘slow radio’ at its best. Nothing much happens as we’re listening but gradually an image emerges — on paper, but also in our heads. At the same time we are slowed down, or rather our thoughts become stilled, lose their hectic hurry, focusing in on what’s being said.