Key Quote
“"and all the girls are walking / one by one by one"”
Imtiaz Dharker · A Century Later
Focus: “one”
The triple repetition of 'one' transforms individual girls into an unstoppable procession — each 'one' is both a single vulnerable child and part of an invincible collective movement.
Technique 1 — SEMANTIC FIELD OF WAR APPLIED TO SCHOOLGIRLS
Dharker constructs a sustained semantic field of military violence — 'bullet', 'target', 'missile', 'weapon' — and applies it to the experience of girls walking to school. This transference of war vocabulary to education creates a devastating parallel: for these girls, going to school is as dangerous as going to war. The technique forces the reader to confront the reality that in many parts of the world, education is a battleground where lives are at stake.
The juxtaposition of military imagery with images of childhood vulnerability — 'fine skin', 'cheek still rounded' — creates a powerful pathos (appeal to emotion). Dharker contrasts the softness and youth of the girls' bodies with the hardness and brutality of the weapons aimed at them. This dissonance between innocence and violence is the poem's emotional core: it insists that we see these girls as children, not as political symbols or statistics.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
Despite the violence that surrounds them, the girls embody progress in its most radical form: they keep walking. The repetition 'one by one by one' creates a sense of inexorable (impossible to stop) forward movement — each girl who walks to school is a small revolution. Dharker suggests that progress is not always dramatic or sudden; sometimes it is the quiet, daily repetition of an act of courage. The poem's title — 'A Century Later' — frames this progress within a historical arc: a hundred years after the soldiers of WWI marched to war, girls march to school, and their courage is equal.
Key Words
Technique 2 — REPETITION & CONTRAST
The repetition of 'one by one by one' is the poem's most powerful device. It creates a rhythmic, processional quality — the girls move with the steady, unstoppable pace of a march. But unlike a military march, which moves in formation, the repetition of 'one' emphasises individuality: each girl is a separate act of courage, a separate life at risk. The technique transforms a political statement into a deeply intimate portrait of individual bravery.
Dharker draws an explicit contrast between the soldiers of 1914 and the schoolgirls of 2014. Both face violence; both walk towards danger; both are young. But the contrast also reveals what has changed and what has not: a century later, the targets of violence are no longer soldiers but children, and the battleground is no longer a trench but a school. Dharker forces the reader to ask whether a world that shoots children for reading books has truly progressed at all.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
MALALA YOUSAFZAI & GIRLS' EDUCATION
The poem alludes to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban in October 2012 for advocating girls' education. Malala survived, became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2014), and symbolised the global fight for girls' right to learn. Dharker does not name Malala directly, allowing the poem to represent all girls who risk their lives for education — the 'one by one by one' who are collectively indomitable (impossible to defeat).
A CENTURY OF CONFLICT
The title 'A Century Later' places the poem exactly 100 years after the start of World War I (1914). Dharker draws a deliberate parallel between the young soldiers who marched to the Western Front and the young girls who walk to school in conflict zones. Both acts require extraordinary courage; both challenge systems that use violence to maintain patriarchal (male-dominated) control. The poem asks whether civilisation has truly progressed in a hundred years.
Key Words
WOW — JUDITH BUTLER'S PERFORMATIVITY — THE RADICAL ACT OF WALKING
Dharker's poem illustrates Judith Butler's concept of performativity — the idea that identity and resistance are not innate qualities but are created through repeated actions. Each time a girl walks to school, she is not merely 'going to school' — she is performing an act of defiance that challenges the Taliban's authority, asserts her right to education, and reconstructs what it means to be a girl in her society. Butler argued that gender itself is performative: it does not exist as a fixed essence but is created through daily repetition. In Dharker's poem, the girls' daily walk is both ordinary and revolutionary — it is precisely its ordinariness, its dailiness, that makes it so powerful. The repetition 'one by one by one' enacts performativity at the level of language: each repetition reinforces the act, making it more real, more undeniable, with every iteration.
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