Alexander Meena - Fault Lines

Fault

Lines

A Memior by Meena Alexander

Revised and Expanded Edition

With a New Preface by Ngg wa Thiongo

CONTENTS

The Cross-Cultural Memoir Series introduces original, significant memoirs from women whose compelling histories map the sources of our differences: generations, national boundaries, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and sexual orientation. The series features stories of contemporary womens lives, providing a record of social transformation, growth in consciousness, and the passionate commitment of individuals who make far-reaching change possible.

THE CROSS-CULTURAL MEMOIR SERIES

Fault Lines

Meena Alexander

Vertigo: A Memoir

Louise DeSalvo

I Dwell in Possibility

Toni McNaron

Under the Rose: A Confession

Flavia Alaya

Come Out the Wilderness: Memoir of a Black Woman Artist

Estella Conwill Mjozo

Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery

Mary Grimley Mason

A Lifetime of Labor

Alice H. Cook

Juggling: A Memoir of Work, Family, and Feminism

Jane S. Gould

Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration

Jo Sinclair

Lion Womans Legacy: An Armenian-American Memoir

Arlene Voski Avakian

Fault

Lines

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Copyright 1993, Book of Childhood 2003 by Meena Alexander

Preface copyright 2003 by Ngg wa Thiongo

First edition 1993

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Meena, 1951-

Fault lines : a memoir / by Meena Alexander ; with a new preface by Ngg wa Thiongo.Rev. and expanded ed.

p. cm. (The cross-cultural memoir series)

eISBN 978-155861-733-9

1. Alexander, Meena, 1951- 2. East Indian AmericansNew York (State)New YorkBiography. 3. IndiaSocial life and customs20th century. 4. Poets, American20th centuryBiography. 5. Poets, Indian20th centuryBiography. 6. Women and literatureUnited States. 7. Women and literatureIndia. 8. New York (N.Y.)Biography. I. Title. II. Series

PR9499.3.A46Z466 2003

811'.54dc22

2003049504

This publication is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Feminist Press would also like to thank Mariam K. Chamberlain, Nancy Hoffman, Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity.

For appa and amma

I t is difficult to find words with which to preface Meena Alexanders personal memories. As brilliantly captured in this new edition of Fault Lines, the memories are their own preface and introduction to a mesmerizing text culled from a life lived in fragments and migrations, a quest for nadu at home and in exile. So much of her life, she tells us, has been motion and flight, the tactics of self-evasion. But the memory is anything but self-evasive; it is more like facing the self. Hers is a life where the present and the past are simultaneous remembrances of each other. Her here, in India, Sudan, Europe, and the United States, is both everywhere and nowhere, a life of a ceaseless search for answers where the only certainty is the qalam she holds in her hand and with which she stitches together the fragments of her experience to make a healing wholeness. After all, as a writer, she asks, what does she have but the raw materials of her own life?

And what a life! Among the numerous global literary allusions that litter the pages of Fault Lines is the figure of Walt Whitman. Like him, she is a poet who contains multitudes and, not surprisingly, the word multiple is among the most potent of those that frequent these pages. Multiple religionsChristianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduismare part of her growing up. She dwells in multiple places she calls home, although quite often they are temporary abodes on her way to elsewhere, crossing borders of geography, culture, and language. India, Africa, Europe, and the United States are her home at different times, but they are also her places of exile from which she longs for home. But which home? Memories of the past and present mingle in her. They are memories of emotional, intellectual, and political awakening, memories of wonder, friendship, and trust but also, painfully, as we learn from this new editions coda, Book of Childhood, of betrayal from he who should have protected her.

It shocks the reader, it shocked me, the fact of something startling where one thought one was safest. But what most fascinates is Meena Alexanders response to these memories of betrayal. She is honest in confronting the memories, but there is also power and glory in her refusal to succumb to the negative. She has a friend and a guide in words and language, which give her the power to name the world, even when it is a world of violence, racism, divisions, and traditions that threaten the humanity in her, wanting to imprison her creativity behind barbed wires. Yes, Language is her refuge, but even here, there is no absolute certainty. She dwells in many languages, and which language shall she use to make sense of her many crossings? Malayalam, the language of her Kerala childhood? Arabic, the language of her home in Africa? French and English, the languages of colonial imposition?

She opts for English. But she wrestles with it, appropriating it rather than letting it appropriate herand one feels, in reading this new edition of Fault Lines, that behind the mask of English she is always reaching out to the Malayalam she knows but cannot write. English is the chosen language of her self-expression, but Malayalam houses her being, the raw basis of her art and self-expression. In so doing, Meena Alexander creates a language of astonishing beauty and elegance of thought, which among her many other attributes, like her capacity to juxtapose experiences in times present and past, in locations here and there, is a compelling reason for reading Fault Lines over and over again. Beauty, in Meena Alexander, becomes a revolutionary ethic, an ally of unity over division, love over hatred, life over death, hope over despair.

Creative exploration of experience is her real nadu, and this new edition of Fault Lines is faultless in its determined refusal to compromise with the truth of experienceeven when it startles one in areas that one thought one was safest.

Ngg wa Thiongo

Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Director, International Center for Writing and Translation

University of California, Irvine

2003

When the time came for her to learn, all the knowledge from her past lives returned to her, as wild geese in autumn to the Ganga River.

Kalidasa, Kumarasambhava 1:30

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.