Fault Lines: A Memoir. by MEENA ALEXANDER. New York: The Feminist Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 226. $12.95 pb.
Poets are blessed, or cursed, with a heightened sensibility, an ability to express the emotions hidden under outward appearances. Meena Alexander is a poet, and her sensibility is expressed here in a luminous prose that makes Fault Lines an uncommon autobiography.
The facts of her life are fascinating enough. Meena Alexander was born in India; her family is Christian from Kerala, the state on the southwestern coast that has been a pepper emporium and a crossroads of trade since long before Vasco da Gama reached its shores at the end of the fifteenth century. Rooted in that tropical soil, her immediate family was uprooted by the peripatetic life of civil service. The eldest of three sisters, Meena was born in Allahabad, a sacred city at the conjunction of the Ganges and Jumna rivers, in the heart of India's northern plain. Summers were spent at the ancestral home among the coconut palms in Kerala. When she was five, her father took a job in the newly-independent Sudan, sent by the Indian government as part of a technical mission. There, in Khartoum, she attended school.
North India, South India, North Africa--these migrations superimposed cultures and environments like geological strata on her consciousness. But her nomadic life did not stop there. She went to England for higher education and later returned to India to teach in Delhi, then in Hyderabad. There she met and married, after a whirlwind courtship, an American, and flew off to live, teach, and give birth to children in New York. Alexander's life can be summarized, prosaically, in terms similar to that of other post-colonial migrants: born on one continent, educated on another, living on a third, at home in all--or in none.
Such a life also involved speaking in many tongues: her native Malayalam, the educational medium of English, the Arabic of Khartoum, Hindi, French. Amidst so many sounds, poetry emerged as a solace:
That's all I am, a woman cracked by multiple migrations. Uprooted so many times she can connect nothing with nothing. Her words are all askew... What I have forgotten is what I have
written: a rag of words wrapped around a shard of recollection. A book with the torn ends visible. Writing in search of a homeland (pp. 3-4).
Fault Lines is a work that relates the seismic discontinuities of Alexander's existence, linking them through the operation of her poetic gift. Her compressed language conveys emotions, sights, sounds, the feel of surfaces. Her description of giving birth captures that visceral moment more vividly than anything else I have ever read on the subject: the bloodiness, the elation, the exhaustion.
To summarize Alexander's memoir, as her life, cannot do it justice, but quotation can only render fragments. Given the theme of her memoir, however, that is somehow appropriate:
Sometimes I am torn apart by two sorts of memories, two opposing ways of being towards the past. The first makes whorls of skin and flesh, coruscating shells, glittering in moonlight. A life embedded in a life ... Rooms within rooms, each filled with its own scent: rosehips, neem leaves, dried hibiscus leaves that hold a cure, cow dung, human excrement, dried gobs of blood ... Another memory invades me: flat, filled with the burning present, cut by existential choices. Composed of bits and pieces of the present, it renders the past suspect, cowardly, baseless. Place names litter it ... Sometimes I think I could lift these scraps of space and much as an indigent dressmaker, cut them into shape. Stitch my days into a patchwork garment fit to wear (pp. 29-30).
Geologic faults and patchwork quilts, the earthquakes of discontinuity and the thread of memory--Meena Alexader's memoir tells a very contemporary tale and yet it glows with the fire and permanence of another composite medium: the golden-hued mosaics of Byzantium. When viewed too close, a mosaic is simply jewel-like fragments, but when viewed as a whole, it is startling in its passion and timelessness. Meena Alexander's story is such a work.
University of Texas at Austin