"Living Space," first published in 1997, is a poem by Imtiaz Dharker. Dharker is a poet, artist, and filmmaker whose work traverses the borders of Pakistan, her country of origin, and her adopted countries of India and the UK. Several themes in her work include belonging to multiple cultures, feeling like an outsider, searching for the feeling of home, geographical and cultural displacement, and the experiences of women.
"Living Space" appears in the collection Postcards from god, published in 1997 by Bloodaxe Books. In the poem, the speaker describes the structural problems of a building into which someone has squeezed a living space. The building is characterized as haphazard and dangerous, with beams crookedly balancing on supports thrust off the vertical, nails pointing out in the open, and the entire structure leaning "toward the miraculous." The speaker then describes eggs that someone has placed in a wire basket. Their fragile structure is compared to a house of faith.
The collection Postcards from god centers around themes of fundamentalism, borders, journeys, grief, and the search for home. Ranjit Hoskote, writing for The Times of India, states,
The poems are amplified by powerful black and white drawings by the author. The line is Imtiaz Dharker's sole weapon in a zone of assault which stretches over the Indian subcontinent's bloody history, the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and the torment of an individual caught between two cultures, divergent world-views.
The "line" mentioned here refers to both Dharker's art and her poetry. The very first lines of "Living Space" read, "There are just not enough / Straight lines," showcasing the artistic and architectural eye of the poet. Dharker's drawings and poems work to evoke the simultaneous fragility and power of human life.
