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Meena Alexander (born Mary Elizabeth Alexander, 1951-2018) was a poet, teacher, essayist, and author who lived in India, Sudan, England, and the United States. Born in India, Meena Alexander moved to Khartoum, aged five, along with her father, a meteorologist, who was posted to Sudan soon after it gained independence. She published her poems in Sudan and decided to adopt the name Meena Alexander instead of Mary Elizabeth Alexander. When she changed her name, she felt “stripped free of the colonial burden” (Fault Lines 74), perhaps inspired by India’s and Sudan’s newfound independence from the British. After completing her doctorate in British Romantic literature in 1973 from the University of Nottingham, Alexander returned to India and accepted teaching positions at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad (now known as the English and Foreign Languages University) and the University of Hyderabad. Eventually, she settled in the United States after marrying historian David Lelyveld. She held teaching assignments at various institutions in the United States, including at Fordham University, Hunter College, City University of New York, and Columbia University.
Alexander received the “Pen Open Book Award” for her book Illiterate Heart, an honour recognising the “most outstanding voices in literature across diverse genres,” besides the “Altruss International Award,” and “The New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Award.” Other notable awards include the “South Asian Literary Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature,” the “Imbongi Yesizwe Poetry International Award,” and the “Word Masala Award.” Her memoir, Fault Lines, was chosen as one of the best books of 1993 by Publisher’s Weekly.
Her poems were first translated into Arabic and published in Sudanese newspapers. Later, they were anthologised and translated into numerous languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, German, Hindi, and Malayalam. She has published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997). These novels exemplify Alexander’s attempts to connect to her roots. Nampally Road tells the story of a young woman searching for an identity, while Manhattan Music investigates the hybridised individuals’ conflicted and fragmented identities. In both novels, the protagonists engage with gendered identity in postcolonial societies.
Meena Alexander addresses themes such as race, displacement, patriarchy, identity, and postcolonialism through her prose, poetry, fiction, and critical work. As critics note: “Alexander has written, in multiple genres, about her intensely personal anguish, her life-long search for homelands” (Shankar 32-33), as well as issues of extremism, ethnic minorities and multiracial rigidities, multiracial identities that reflect complex interactions between different racial and ethnic groups. Though Alexander has displayed her mastery in various genres, she affirms in an interview with Ruth Maxey that there is “integrity to writing poetry,” and it is “a great glory…, a gift” (Maxey 23) to be a poet. She presents herself as an Indian in all her poetic years, but with multiple cultural backgrounds: born in Allahabad, raised in Khartoum, living in New York.
Alexander has also authored two academic works, The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1983), which explores the poetic endeavour to construct a self, and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989), that studies the life and works of the three prominent women writers from the Romantic era. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections of Postcolonial Experience (1996) combines essays and poems representing Alexander’s “combination of real and imaginary” experiences on writing, relocation and life in the USA. In revisiting and reconnecting with memories, history, and experiences in India, Sudan, and Manhattan, Alexander presents crucial aspects of the diasporic sensibilities. The effects of colonialism and diasporic experiences provide the personal and poetic context for her writing. As such, Alexander “challenges her position as an ethnic minority in the United States, redefining herself as a postcolonial and diasporic writer within a global context marked by colonial transoceanic voyages” (Sabo 68). Her prose and poetry, informed by feminism and postcolonialism, interweave the harrowing truths of body and language.
Alexander’s early volumes, I Root my Name (1977), The Bird’s Bright Wing (1976) and Without Place (1977), delve into the complexities of migration, displacement and identity. Her first book, published in the United States, House of a Thousand Doors (1988), is a collection of poetry and prose divided into three sections, focusing on the poet’s personal experiences and the world she lives in. The titular poem represents the diverse forces that act upon an individual, emphasising the consequences of colonial exploitation and the entrenched patriarchal milieu in colonial and postcolonial India. In “House of a Thousand Doors,” she writes:
She kneels at each
of the thousand doors in turn
paying her dues.
Her debt is endless.
I hear the flute played in darkness,
a bride’s music.A poor forked thing
I watch her kneel in all my lifetime
imploring the household gods
who will not let her in.(House of a Thousand Doors 3)
The last lines of the poem evoke the memory of her grandmother. Alexander’s personal writing serves as a window to view the fragmented experience of her grandmother, for whom identity remained conflicted. Further, the power of the images evoked by these words is underscored by the ‘gods’ in lowercase. The ‘gods’ here can be a metaphor for the men in the household, symbolising the oppressive forces that confined the women. Alexander suggests that the grandmother’s experiences are common to most women in India’s patriarchal society.
The poet also reflects on the servitude of the nation and the lasting impact of colonialism. The house is symbolic of India being colonised by the British. Just like the grandmother who kneeled at each of the thousand doors, India had to bow before the colonial powers. Likewise, through the complexity of her memories, Alexander draws connections between patriarchy, womanhood and postcolonial identity in “Her Garden,” “Her Mother’s Words,” and “Passion.”
In “Question Time,” she explores womanhood caught in a patriarchal system. “Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt, /Hand raised in a crowded room – /What use is poetry. /Above us, lights flickered, /Something wrong with the wiring…Standing apart I looked at her and said -/We have poetry.” (Black Renaissance 129). Suppression is symbolised as “flickering lights” and therefore of accompanying “darkness.” The poet’s imagery suggests a disarranged postcolonial identity, which also signals the miserable lives of the Indian women.
Alexander’s poetry also depicts her cosmopolitan upbringing and influences. In The Shock of Arrival, the poem “Art of Pariahs” foregrounds racism and racialised attacks in New York, violence in the borderlands, the harsh realities of displacement and, again, the world of womanhood. The poet uses three queens to represent different trajectories of the poet’s identity. While Draupadi, from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, embodies the poet’s ethnic and racial identity, Rani Lakshmibai represents India’s colonial history, and the Queen of Nubia signifies the transnational aspect of her writing self, being raised in Sudan:
Back against the kitchen stove
Draupadi sings:
—-
The Queen of Nubia,…
The Rani of Jhansi,…
.…They have entered with me
into North America and share these walls.
We make up an art of pariahs:
(Shock of Arrival 8)
Draupadi, the Rani of Jhansi, and the Queen of Nubia from diverse cultures also enable Alexander to suggest the role of indomitable women. Draupadi, a mythological character sent into exile, is presented as a young immigrant in the new land. Draupadi is seen singing in her kitchen in New York City, and the song that Draupadi sings is sad and exemplifies racialised trauma. Alexander represents her multicultural and transnational self through the Queen of Nubia and her rootedness in her motherland through the Rani of Jhansi. Her poetic images and representations express the deprived existence of a migrant woman and the constant longing to be free from subjugation, race, and colour, but also draw upon the many cultures she had grown up in.
She also highlights racial discrimination and its devastating consequences in a country where people from different communities live. The violence that she had heard of and experienced is powerfully sketched for us:
Two black children spray painted white,
their eyes burning,
a white child raped in a car
for her pale skin’s sake,
an Indian child stoned by a bus-shelter,
they thought her white in twilight.
(Shock of Arrival 8)
The children in Manhattan embody ethnicities that are determined by existing cultural presumptions. The underground railroad recalls African-American culture, whereas Manhattan’s mixed rivers rising against all obstacles embody the heterogeneous composition of the inhabitants of America. At the end of the poem, the poet urges the readers to “Come walk with me toward a broken wall,” thus merging the firmness of the wall with the fluidity of “Manhattan’s mixed rivers,” in order to suggest the need for both strength and fluidity in identity formation. The poem also calls for due respect and regard to diverse cultural and literary traditions. “Pariah,” roughly translated as outsider/outcaste, is a poem about practices of social and cultural inclusion and exclusion in diasporic societies. The poet hopes for a better future where the walls of racial and cultural prejudice will be dismantled to enable the growth of a peaceful transnational world.
Alexander’s poetry reflects her understanding of multiple migrations and diasporic experiences. On the one hand, it represents the trauma inflicted through dislocation; on the other, it attempts to transcend cultural barriers. In poems like “Central Park” from the volume Raw Silk and “San Andreas Fault” from the Illiterate Heart, Alexander demonstrates the experience of immigrants and the burden of racial and cultural discrimination they carry. “Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers” is an excellent example where she seeks to reach a more robust understanding of the attacks on South Asians in the aftermath of 9/11:
What a shame
they scared you so
you plucked your sari off,
crushed it into a ball
then spread it
on the toilet floor
Sparks from the towers
fled through the weave of silk.
With your black hair
and sun dark skin
you’re just a child of earth.
Kabir the weaver sings:
O men and dogs
in times of grief
our rolling earth
grows small.
(Indian Literature 15)
The poem focuses on the migrant lives caught in the aftermath of 9/11 in the postcolonial, globalised world. Dislocated and relocated into multiple cities, languages and cultures, “Kabir Sings” represents a poet who is a woman of colour, “a South Indian woman who makes up lines in English . . . . A Third World woman poet . . . ?” (Fault Lines 193).
Raw Silk (2004) continues the themes of dislocation, displacement, heterogeneity, terrorism, trauma, and fragmentation. Alexander moves across different forms of identity-based violence. Violence perpetrated through terrorism echoes in the poem “Aftermath”:
There is an uncommon light in the sky
Pale petals are scored into stone.. . .
But its leaves are filled with insects
With wings the color of dry blood.
At the far side of the river Hudson
By the southern tip of our island
. . .
An eye, a lip, a cut hand blooms
Sweet and bitter smoke stains the sky.
(Raw Silk 9)
The poet uses the terrain to show the effects of the 9/11 attacks. Death, brutality, radicalism, and destruction are personified through several images in her poetry.
In other poems, she writes about the atrocities committed against minority groups in India. In “Naroda Patiya,” Alexander writes:
Three armed men.
out they plucked
a tiny heart
beating with her own.
No cries
were heard
in the city.
Even the sparrows
by the temple gate
swallowed their song.
(Raw Silk 75)
The poem references the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre in Gujarat. Alexander recalls the horrific incident of a nine-month pregnant woman ripped open, her foetus pulled out and thrown into the fire. The poem is a powerful account of the violence perpetrated against the minorities in India. In other poems, she speaks of the hatred between communities in poems like “Bengali Market” :
In our country there are two million dead
and more for whom no rites were said.
No land on earth can bear this.
Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.All day I hear the scissor bird cry
cut cut cut cut cut
It is the bird Kalidasa heard
as he stood singing of buried love.(Raw Silk 81)
These lines capture the extreme violence, the damage to the human psyche and the politics that causes the violence. “Two Million” is a poem that is built around the statistics of the catastrophe.
Atmospheric Embroidery (2015) is another collection of poems reflecting her loneliness and struggle to reconcile with her homeland. It also provides an insight into her personal and political thoughts across India, America, and North Africa.
Strong emotions mark the poems and often thematise violence. “Moksha” reflects the pain and trauma inflicted in the Nirbhaya case (2012):
By her, in a kurta knotted at the sleeves
– Who knew that spirits could beckon through clothes –
The one they called Nirbhaya –
A young thing, raped by six men in a moving bus.
(She fought back with fists and teeth)
Near Munirka bus station where I once stood
Twenty-three years old, just her age,
Clad in thin cotton, shivering in my sandals
(Atmospheric Embroidery 34)
These lines indicate the horror and psychological trauma of a rape-and-murder victim, while emphasising the vulnerability of women in public spaces.
In “Death of a Young Dalit,” a poem on Rohith Vemula’s suicide, Alexander captures the history of discrimination in India:
A twenty-six-year-old man, plump boy face
Sets pen to paper – My birth
Is my fatal accident. I can never recover
From my childhood loneliness.Dark body once cupped in a mother’s arms
Now in a house of dust. Not cipher, not scheme
For others to throttle and parse
(Those hucksters and swindlers,
Purveyors of hot hate, casting him out).(World Literature Today 31)
The images capture the lives of young people caught in a biased education system. “Fatal accident” as a phrase from Vemula’s suicide note gestures at the societal rejection of the marginalised people.
Alexander’s poetry is invariably imbued with the idea of home, memory, and identity. Most of her volumes, viz., Stone Roots (1980), River and Bridge (1995/ 1996), Illiterate Heart (2002), Quickly Changing River (2008), and In Praise of Fragments (2020) contain poems that trace her childhood memories of Kerala, both pleasant and unpleasant, such as “Black River, Walled Garden,” “Gold Horizon” and “Field in Summer.” On being asked by Lavina Shankar in an interview for Meridians about constantly re-examining the past in her works, the poet responds that “going with the dark, backward in a dismal time, and coming back, there is a recuperation, a constant series of recuperations” that allows her to “recover traumatic memories” (Shankar and Alexander 35-36).
At the same time, her poetry examines the relationship between the past and the present. Multiculturalism finds insistent expression in Alexander’s poetry. Her transformation from “Mary” to “Meena” erases a troubling colonial history but also has religious connotations. Thus, the appellation “Meena” could allude to “fish” in her mother tongue, Malayalam, and/or the diminutive for the art of enamelling in Urdu and Persian. Such lines emphasise her hyphenated identity of being an Indian and an American, with Christian, Hindu and Islamic cultural backgrounds, representing numerous worlds in her past.
Nostalgia, the anonymity of being an immigrant, and trials of assimilation, belonging, and identity are reflected in her works. Alexander travelled multiple geographical spaces where cultures meet to construct identities. Her poem “River and Bridge” symbolises the journeys she has undertaken:
I have come to the Hudson’s edge to begin my life
to be born again, to see as water might
in a landscape of mist, burnished trees,
a bridge that seizes crossing.
(River and Bridge 25)
Alexander says in her essay, “An Intimate Violence: Race, Gender, and the Making of Poems,” that she wrote the poem “River and Bridge” during her migration when she “felt that she needed to begin another life, to be born again” (3). A “bridge that seizes crossing” signifies the hurdles one must encounter in migration and acculturation into the new land. Furthermore, she writes, “to be born again is to pass beyond the markings of race, the violations visited on” (3). The cosmopolitan self of the poet hopes for a better future where the walls of patriarchal, racial, and cultural prejudice will be dismantled.
Alexander’s memoir, Fault Lines (1993), reflects on her multiple dislocations and relocations. The book discusses questions of race, gender and ethnicity. In addition, it unpacks the poet’s anguish from her childhood days. It narrates the sexual abuse and intimate violence foisted on her by her maternal grandfather, who was seen as loving and caring by others. The memoir focuses on the growth of Alexander’s complex identity and selfhood. Her ethnicity as an Asian American is delineated with intensity and acuteness She asks: “Can I become just what I want? So, is this the land of opportunity, the America of dreams?” (Fault Lines 202). According to Alexander, the book’s title represents the cracks formed on the land’s surface after an earthquake, revealing the commotion and disaster it has caused. Similarly, the book enumerates the circumstances that led to disruptions in the poet’s diasporic life, that have left faultlines in her self. “This is Alexander’s invention and contribution to the way in which loss of home and country split the migrant/immigrant” (Valladares 281).
Meena Alexander’s poetry is a journey through borders, languages, and cultures. Her literary works are marked by her multiple displacements and relocations that have “shaped her literary aesthetics” (Sabo 68).
Works Cited
Alexander, Meena. Atmospheric Embroidery. Hatchett India, 2018.
—. “An Intimate Violence: Race, Gender, and the Making of Poems.” The Journal of
Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, vol. 9, no. 2, Fall
1998, pp. 1-8.
—. “Death of a Young Dalit.” World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 6, Nov-Dec 2016, p. 31.
—. Fault Lines. Feminist Press, 1993.
—. House of Thousand Doors. Three Continents Press, 1988.
—. Illiterate Heart. Tri Quarterly Books, 2002.
—. “Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers.” Indian Literature, vol. 46, no. 6, 2002, p. 15.
—. “Question Time.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, vol. 10, no. 2-3, 2010, p. 121.
—. Raw Silk. Tri Quarterly Books, 2004.
—. River and Bridge. TSAR Publications, 1995/1996.
—. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. South End Press, 1999.
Maxey, Ruth. “Interview: Meena Alexander.” MELUS, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 21–39.
Ray, Sanjana. “Naroda Patiya Riots: A Timeline of the Case that Killed 97 Muslims.” The
Quint, 20 April 2018. https://www.thequint.com/news/india/a-timeline-of-the-naroda-
patiya-case.
Sabo, Oana. “Creativity and Place: Meena Alexander’s Poetics of Migration.” Imagining
Exile and Transcultural Displacement, special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary
Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67-80.
Shankar, Lavina. “Re-visioning Memories Old and New: A Conversation with Meena
Alexander.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. Duke University Press, vol.
8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 32-48.
Valladares, Michelle Yasmine. “Remembering Meena Alexander.” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1 & 2, 2019, pp.
279-86.
PUBLICATIONS BY MEENA ALEXANDER
Poetry
The Bird’s Bright Wing. Writers Workshop, 1976.
I Root my Name. Writers Workshop, 1977.
Without Place. Writers Workshop,1977.
Stone Roots. Arnold-Heinemann, 1980.
House of Thousand Doors. Three Continents Press, 1988.
River and Bridge. TSAR Publications, 1995/ 1996.
Illiterate Heart. Tri Quarterly Books, 2002.
Raw Silk. Tri Quarterly Books, 2004.
Quickly Changing River. Tri Quarterly Books, 2008.
Shimla. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2012.
Birthplace with Buried Stones. Tri Quarterly Books, 2013.
Atmospheric Embroidery. Hatchett India, 2015.
In Praise of Fragments. Night boat Books, 2020.
Chapter Books
The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts. Red Dust, 1989.
Night-Scene, the Garden. Red Dust, 1992.
Otto poesie da Quickly changing river (in Italian). Translated by Fazzini, Marco. Sinopia di
Venezia, 2011.
Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems. Al-Quds University, 2012.
Dreaming in Shimla: Letter to my Mother. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2015.
Prose and Criticism
The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. South End Press, 1999.
Poetics of Dislocation. U of Michigan P, 2009.
Novels
Nampally Road. Mercury House, 1991.
Manhattan Music. Mercury House, 1996.
Memoirs
Fault Lines. Feminist Press, 1993.
Meena; wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Fault Lines (2nd ed.). The Feminist Press, 2003.
Criticism
The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism. Humanities Press, 1979.
Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.
Macmillan Education, 1989.
Edited Collections
Indian Love Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing. Yale UP, 2018.
Other Works
In the Middle Earth (One-Act Play) – (Enact, 1977).
Introduction. Truth Tales: Stories by Contemporary Indian Women Writers. Feminist Press,
1990, pp. 11-24.
Foreword to Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns (eds), Blood into Ink, Twentieth
Century South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War. Westview Press, 1994,
- xi-xviii.
“Bodily Inventions: A Note on the Poem.” Special Issue of The Asian Pacific American
Journal, vol.5, no. 1, 1996, pp. 21–27.
Preface. Cast Me Out If You Will: Stories and Memoir Pieces by Lalithambika
Antherjanam. Feminist Press, 1998, pp. viii-xii.
Foreword. Indian Love Poems. Knopf, 2005, pp. 13–18.
Header Image: Marion Ettlinger/poets.org
