International Journal of Language and Linguistics Vol. 2, No.

2; June 2015

A Woman Cracked by Multiple Migrations: Search for Identity in Meena

Asst. Prof. Sezer Sabriye IKIZ

Abstract
Meena Alexander is an internationally known Indian American poet, scholar and writer. Born in Allahabad, India
in 1951 to Syrian Christian Family, she accompanied her parents when she was five to Khartoum, Sudan, later
attended university of Khartoum where she studied English and French Literature. Then she moved to England
for her doctoral studies in Nottingham. She returned to teach in Delhi and Hyderabad where she met her husband
and after marriage she moved to New York. She wrote her memoir Fault Lines in 1993. Meena Alexander traces
her life from childhood in India through youth and education in Africa and England to marriage and motherhood
in New York. As a result of her family’s relocations as a youth, Alexander struggles in Fault Lines to forge a
sense of identity, despite a past full of moves and changes. This work revolves around theme of establishing one’s
self, an identity independent one’s surroundings. In this paper, how Meena Alexander does search for her own
identity and self creation in a world that strives to define, identify and label people will be analysed.
Keywords: Meena Alexander, memoir, multiple migrations, searching for self
Meena Alexander is a South Asian immigrant poet, writer and scholar who is known internationally. She was
born on February 17, 1951 in Allahabad, in India to George and Mary Alexander. Her family was from Kerala,
South India and they were Syrian Christians. She is the eldest of the three children. Alexander left for Khartoum
with her parents when she was five years old. She went to school at Khartoum and she entered the University of
Khartoum at the age of thirteen. She was a curious and intelligent child and by the time she was fifteen, her poems
were translated into Arabic and published in Sudanese newspapers. When she was eighteen years old, The
University of Nottingham in England awarded her a scholarship to get her Ph.D. After finishing her doctoral
thesis on “Construction of Self Identity in the Early English Romantic Poets” she returned to India at the age of
twenty two. She did not want to forget her Indian identity. She lectured in various Indian universities, including
University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and University of Hyderabad. In Hyderabad she met with her
husband, David who was a historian doing research there. During the five years she lived in India she published
her first three books of poetry: The Bird's Bright Ring (1976), I Root My Name (1977), and Without Place (1978).
In 1979 she was a visiting fellow at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. The following year she married and moved
to New York City and became an assistant professor at Fordham University, where she remained until 1987 when
she became an assistant professor in the English Department at Hunter College, the City University of New York
(CUNY). Two years later she joined the graduate faculty of the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate
Center. In 1992 she was made full professor of English and Women’s Studies. She was appointed Distinguished
Professor of English in 1999 and continues to teach in the PhD program at the Graduate Center and the MFA
program at Hunter College. Over the years she has also taught poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the
Arts at Columbia University. Since moving to New York, Alexander has been a productive author, publishing six
more volumes of poetry, two books of literary criticism, two books of lyric essays, two novels, and a memoir She
now lives in New York with her husband David Lilyveld, son Adam Kuruvilla and daughter Svathi Marian.
Meena Alexander wrote her memoir Fault Lines in 1993. and in this book she tries to describe her experiences
and events that shaped her life and writing. She does search for her identity and tries to find her place in a world
attempts to define, identify and label people. In this paper, how Meena Alexander achieves her aim will be
explored.

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The title of the book is remarkable. Fault Lines is the term used by geologists to describe cracks in the earth.
Ponzanesi (2004) states that Alexander uses it to visualize the uprooting she has faced in her life. (53)
Alexander wants to pay attention to the fact that living in a female body in a world where the female body is a site
for endless struggles. It becomes worse if you are a migrant woman. In the early pages of Fault Lines, Meena
Alexander describes her situation very clearly. She states that:
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. And so I tormented myself on summer nights, and in the chill wind of autumn,
tossing back and forth, worrying myself sick. Till my mind slipped back to my mother- amma- she who gave birth
to me, and to amma’s amma, my veliammachi, grandmother Kunju, drawing me back into the darkness of the
Tiruvella house with its cool bedrooms and coiled verandas: the shelter of memory. But the house of memory is
fragile; made up in the mind’s space. Even what I remember best, I am forced to admit, is what has flashed up
form in the face of present danger, at the tail end of the century, where everything is to be elaborated, spelt out,
precariously reconstructed. And there is little sanctity, even in remembrance. What I have forgotten is what I have
written: a rag of words wrapped around a shard of recollection. A book with torn ends visible. Writing in search
of a homeland. (FL : 2-3)
She is writing her memoir in search of a homeland and she indulges in a voyage of “self-discovery” and begins
her narrative in a chronological order. She moves back and forth, to the past and to the present. It is about being
born into a female body; and about the difficulty of living in space, moving about so much, living with ground
rules. She says “ I wanted to give voice to my flesh, to learn to live as a woman. To do that, I had to spit out the
Stones that were in my mouth. I had to become a ghost, enter my own flesh”.( FL:16)
As a result of her family’s relocations as a youth, Alexander struggles in Fault Lines to forge a sense of identity,
despite a past full of moves and changes. For Sujatha (2013) this work revolves around theme of establishing
one’s self, an identity independent of one’s surroundings.(45) In fact, the title itself suggests a questioning of
lines, boundaries, definitions of oneself. Alexander searches for her own identity and self-creation in the middle
of a world that tries to define, identify and label people. These definitions of race and nationality prove difficult to
defy. Alexander in her memoir, Fault Lines traces her growth as a child, woman, wife, mother and writer over
borders and across multiple cultures. There are reflections and recollections about the cities, towns, villages she
had lived in since birth; Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, within the boundaries of
India; Khartoum in Sudan, Nottingham in Britain and Manhattan. She journeys back and forth in time, recollects
her childhood experiences in Kerala, childhood images like conch shell, seashore, the rooms, the distant house,
gardens and different characters like her mother, father, maternal, paternal grandparents, servants, cooks, children,
friends all knotted into each other. ( Sujatha, 2013: 45) ”Alienation” or sense of not belonging anywhere has
become the major obsession of Alexander. She is always traveling and feels a stranger wherever she goes and is
living on the margin in alien lands amongst alien people.
According to Sandra Ponzanesi (2004), memories of her past in India rescue her initially from being a non entity
in a world that survives only through its ability to define, identify and label people. (53) These are memories
coming from the foundational basis of a conscious existence. It reminds Homi Khabha’s words. He says in
Location of Culture (1994) “to establish one’s cultural identity, memory is sometimes necessary”. For Khabha,
“Remembering is never a quite act of introspection or restrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting
together of the dismembered past to make sense of the present”. (1994 63) But memory itself is unreliable, there
is little sanctity even in remembrance. Alexander admits. The question “why did I leave India?” often torments
Alexander . She writes, all I knew was that something had broken loose from inside, me, was all molten”.(FL146)
And what was “molten” and “broken loose” had to do with India, and to write, Alexander finds she had “to flee
into a colder climate else she would burn up and all her words with her.” (FL 146)
Marrying David and moving to America might have resolved this trauma. But America proves to be more
tormenting. Marrying a man of her choice, coming with him to another country, giving birth and finding a
university job within a short time do not resolve the inner conflicts of rootlessness and displacement. She says:
When I arrived in America in 1979, five months pregnant, newly married to David, whom I had met in
Hyderabad, I felt torn from the India I had learnt to love. In those days I was struck by all the differences between
Hyderabad and New York. I could not get over how little dust there seemed to be in Manhattan. Then why packup
the vegetables, celery, broccoli, cabbage, in plastic?
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International Journal of Language and Linguistics Vol. 2, No. 2; June 2015

My own soul seemed to me, then, a cabbagelike thing, closed tight in a plastic cover. My two worlds, present and
past, were torn apart, and I was the fault line, the crack that marked the dislocation ( FL 15)
Meena Alexander had to learn something else when she moved to America. Racism is part of daily life in the
States. She realizes her “otherness” there. Her alienation intensifies when on one occasion a white man in black
leather jacket calls her “ black bitch”. Her condition was similiar to those of other Indian women – who were
forced to give up their saris and wear western clothes lest they lose their jobs, or the Asian children in the city
schools, or to those Indians who lived through racial stonings and murder in Jersey city, and who lived in fear of
the Dot Buster skinheads. Did one know what it to be unwhite in America. (FL 169) This question shows the
extent of psychological oppression on the marginalized communities in a country. According to Nair (2007) ,
marrying a white man intensifies the competing anxieties color which extends itself to the identity of her children,
Adam and Svati. (77) Svati states, “You are brown mama, Adam is Brown Adam, and I am peach Svati. (FL 170)
The tension surrounding self-identification emerges in a scene where Alexander’s son, Adam encounters a man
who asks him What are you? Adam, of mixed heritage, chooses to identify himself as neither American nor
Indian, but rather a Jedi knight. ( FL 172) He escapes a fantasy land where such distinctions were unnecessary.
Even choosing a cultural identification has its boundaries and borders by which to abide. Meena also had to tell
the difference between Native American Indians and Native Indians. Her daughter thought that they were Native
American. These all raise the question of identity. “Who are we?” What selves can we construct tol ive by? How
shall we mark out space? How shall we live another day? (174) If you are an immigrant living in United States,
you have to define yourself constantly. Meena Alexander tries to answer the question “who are you? “ as follows
As much as anything else I am a poet writing in America. But American poet? What sort? Surely not of the
Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens variety? An Asian-American poet then? Clearly that sounds beter. Poet tout
court? Will that fit? No, not at all. There is very little I can be tout court in America except perhaps woman,
mother. But even there, I wonder. Everything that comes to me is hyphenated. A woman poet, a woman poet of
color, a South Indian woman poet who makes up lines in English, a postcolonial language, as she waits for the red
lights to change on Broadway. A Third World woman poet, who takes as her right the inner city of Manhattan,
making up poems about the hellhole of the subway line, the burnt-out blocks so close to home on the Upper West
Side, finding there, news of the world.( FL 193-94)
Early in her youth, Alexander’s mother tells her she must never take a job, that her work is to raise her children.
Arranged marriages are also part of Indian culture. Alexander resisted all these traditions and she chose herself a
different path from her mother’s. She tried to be successful both in her career and family. Alexander’s process of
self- creation has been a great challenge. . She tries to create an identity despite her past. She fights against the
definitions and traditions set by society. Meena Alexander’s struggle to develop her sense of self-identity lies in
being true to her creative self- thus going beyond the boundary lines set by nation , race, gender, and color.
Meena feels that because she has lived in several different places throughout her life and lived several different
lives, speaking several different languages that she has ultimately become multiple being locked into the journeys
of one body. As an adolescent she is torn between the conflicts of the dictates of her mother about ideal
womanhood and the requirements of feminity and the claims of intelligence. In Khartoum she was forced to learn
and speak English along with Malayalam and Hindi.She feels inferior to others and cannot interact with others as
she considers herself ugly because of her skin color. “Ethnicity” becomes an important concern as one shift one’s
location and becomes a member of minor community in a foreign land. She says” In India no one asked if I were
Asian or American Asian, here we are part of a minority”. An immigrant woman is at once made conscious of her
difference in terms of color, race and gender. The racial discrimination and colonization compound her pain of
dislocation. She feels she is exiled perpetually. She is unable to severe her cultural links with India. Languages
become her refuge. She dwells in many languages but She chooses English as best way of self- expression among
all others.
Women in diasporas are doubly marginalized, as women and as members of a minority community. As
Sujatha(2013) points out: the cultural displacement and sense of isolation are typical to migrant writers’
existence. The tensions of transplanted existence, the struggle for survival in an alien land and culture, the
traumatic experiences cracked by multiple identities, the state of rootlessness, insecurity, denial of independence
and a safe anchorage etc. are compounded in case of migrant women. For diaspora writers, there is a greater
compulsion to discover “self”. (47)

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Meena Alexander feels this compulsion and she tries to survive herself and wants to find her “self”. Writing
memoir helps her. Alexander speaks all the things that unspeakable before.

References
Alexander, Meena. (2003) Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY.
Khabha, Homi. (1994). The Location of Culture., London: Routledge.
Nair, Rama.(2007) The Concept of Identity in Indian Immigrant Women in America: A Literary Perspective. In
M.Q.Khan and Bijay Kumar Das.(Eds.) Studies in Postcolonial Literature. New Delhi : Atlantic
Publishers:
Ponzanesi, Sandra.(2004) Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and
Afro-Italian Diaspora. Albany, NY :SUNY Press.
Sujatha, Smt.K.B. (September 2013) Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines- An Expatriate Woman’s Autobiography.
International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL) Volume1, Issue 3. Pp. 44-
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