LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

MIMI KHALVATI (b. 1944) is a warm poet. Her major topics are parenthood and love. She talks with equal fondness about her parents, her son and daughter, her friends, her lover. She was born in Tehran and remembers it with love, but she is not a displaced poet even though she lives in London now and has done so for most of her life. She is a richer Desperado than those born in England to begin with. Her map is bigger and her mind has more images in store. She knows how to exploit the picturesque side of her native culture, but fits perfectly into Englishness.

Solitude is permanent with Mimi Khalvati. Even her lines are alone, meaning rhymeless, each on its own. One poem has a P.S. like a letter, written in solitude to the reader who reads alone, too. Her background is full of flavour and she loves to take refuge in dissimilarity, calling her reader to the magic world of Scheherazade, which, since it was first told has acquired political implications, too:

Have you ever been to Isfahan? Tabriz, or Shiraz?

The roses of Shiraz! Or were they only in Sa'di

on a shelf in Hornsey library in bad translations?

Where are the roses of Shiraz? I asked, long

before the revolution. Shiraz is not what it was, my mother said,          

but there were rose gardens there, yes, I remember when we were children    

Baba Sayeed used to take us. Beautiful! Of course, nothing like Regent's Park.

                                                (Christmas Greetings)

Belonging to two worlds at once makes her feel more at home in both. She loves to hear herself utter words in both languages, Arabic and English. She likes to render speech, too (Whittington Hospital, March 1990, The Promenade). Conversationalism combines with theatrical exclamations and decorous images which are meant to suggest fairy-tales.

Irony is not the poet’s forte. Mimi Khalvati prefers tenderness. Having grown up in a boarding school, she has the cult of friendship and is swept off her feet by any token of affection. Darling has a stanza in which the poet describes herself thus:

There I am, small, dark, wordless

but something bright and shining

in me wanting to be heard.

Mockery or caricature, or even incidents without emotion, plain stories, are not right for Khalvati. She cannot live without warmth. When for once she uses rhyme, it is to stress the inborn need to be loved, the childish instinct to belong:

I miss you — let me count the ways —

morning, noon and night;

I miss you on my darkest days

and when things for once go right.

I miss you in the inbetweens,

in shades of grey and gaps,

like bowling-alleys miss their greens,

lost mariners their maps.

I miss you like the tide its mark,

a church its congregation,

Londoners a place to park,

refugees their nation. (Just to Say)

The central mood of Mimi Khalvati’s poetry is the need to be safe. She wants to feel at home, accepted, protected, loved. What she gets in her life is to be the one who gives all those things, or so her poems seem to say. Song is this sentimental poet’s invitation to all her readers:

I have landed

as if on the wing

of a small plane.

It is a song I have

landed on that barely

feels my weight.

Sky is thick with wishes.

Regrets fall down

like rain.

Visit me.

I am always in

even when the place

looks empty,

even though the locks

are changed.