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Meena Alexander

Born in Allahabad, India, poet Meena Alexander was raised in Kerala and

Sudan. She earned a BA at Khartoum University and a PhD at Nottingham

University. Described as “undoubtedly one of the finest poets of

contemporary times” by The Statesman (India), she was the author of

numerous collections of poetry, including Atmospheric

Embroidery (2018), Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013), and PEN Open

Book Award-winner Illiterate Heart (2002). In her poetry, which has been

translated into several languages, she explores migration, trauma, and

reconciliation. Alexander’s prose includes the memoir Fault Lines (1993,

expanded in 2003), the novels Manhattan Music (1997) and Nampally

Road (1991), the essay collections Poetics of Dislocation (2009) and The

Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), as well as

the critical studies Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy

Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989) and The Poetic Self: Towards a
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Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979). She is the editor of Indian Love

Poems (2005) and Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing

Polyglot and sensual, Alexander’s work has been influenced by the Indian poets

Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das, as well as the American poets Adrienne

Rich and Galway Kinnell. Alexander’s poems frequently confront the difficult

issues of exile and identity, while still maintaining a generous spirit.

Illiterate Heart

One summer holiday I returned

to the house where I was raised.
Nineteen years old, I crouched
on the damp floor where grandfather’s
library used to be, thumbed through
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
thinking why should they imagine no one else
has such rivers in their lives?
I was Marlowe and Kurtz and still more
a black woman just visible at the shore.
I thought it’s all happened, all happened before.
So it was I began, unsure of the words
I was to use still waiting for a ghost
to stop me crying out:
You think you write poetry! Hey you –
as he sidestepped me dressed neatly
in his kurta and dhoti,
a mahakavi from the temples of
right thought.
Or one in white flannels
unerringly English, lured from Dove Cottage ,
transfixed by carousels of blood ,
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Danton’s daring, stumbling over stones

never noticing his outstretched
hand passed through me.
II.
How did I come to this script?
Amma taught me from the Reading Made Easy
books , Steps 1 & 2 pointed out Tom and Bess
little English children
sweet vowels of flesh they mouthed to perfection:
aa ee ii oo uu a(apple) b(bat) c(cat) d(dat)
Dat? I could not get, so keen the rhymes made me,
sense overthrown.
Those children wore starched knicker
bockers or sailor suits and caps ,
waved Union Jacks,
tilted at sugar beets.
O white as milk
their winding sheets!
I imagined them dead all winter
packed into icicles,
tiny and red, frail homunculus each one
sucking on alphabets.
Amma took great care with the books,
wrapped them in newsprint lest something
should spill, set them on the rosewood sill.
When wild doves perched they shook
droplets from quicksilver wings
onto fading covers.
The books sat between Gandhi’s Experiments
with Truth and a minute crown of thorns
a visiting bishop had brought.
He told us that the people of Jerusalem
spoke many tongues including Arabic, Persian
Syriac as in our liturgy, Aramaic too.
Donkeys dragged weights through tiny streets.
Like our buffaloes, he laughed.
I had to perform my Jana Gana Mana for him
and Wordsworth’s daffodil poem —
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the latter I turned into a rural terror

my version of the chartered streets.
III.
What beats in my heart? Who can tell?
I cannot tease my writing hand around
that burnt hole of sense, figure out the
quickstep of syllables.
On pages where I read the words of Gandhi
and Marx, saw the light of the Gospels,
the script started to quiver and flick.
Letters grew fins and tails.
Swords sprang from the hips of consonants,
vowels grew ribbed and sharp.
Pages bound into leather
turned the color of ink.
My body flew apart :
wrist, throat, elbow, thigh,
knee where a mole rose,
bony scapula, blunt cut hair,
then utter stillness as a white sheet
dropped on nostrils and neck.
Black milk of childhood drunk
and drunk again!
I longed to be like Tom and Bess
dead flat on paper.
IV.
At noon I burrowed through
Malayalam sounds,
slashes of sense, a floating trail.
Nights I raced into the garden.
Smoke on my tongue, wet earth
from twisted roots of banyan
and fiscus Indica.
What burnt in the mirror
of the great house
became a fierce condiment.
A metier almost:
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aa i ii u uu au um aha ka kh
ga gha nga cha chha ja ja nja
njana (my sole self), njaman (knowledge)
nunni (gratitude) ammechi, appechan,
veliappechan (grandfather).
Uproar of sense, harsh tutelage:
aana (elephant) amma (tortoise)
ambjuan (lotus).
A child mouthing words
to flee family.
I will never enter that house I swore,
I’ll never be locked in a cage of script.
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
I committed that to memory,
later added : ce lieu me plaît
dominé de flambeaux.
V.
In dreams I was a child babbling
at the gate splitting into two,
three to make herself safe.
Grown women combing black hair
in moonlight by the railroad track,
stuck forever at the accidental edge.
O the body in parts,
bruised buttress of heaven!
she cries,
a child in a village church
clambering into embroidered vestements
to sing at midnight a high sweet tune.
Or older now
musing in sunlight
combing a few white strands of hair.
To be able to fail.
To set oneself up
so that failure is also possible.
Yes,
that too
however it is grasped.
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The movement towards self definition.

A woman walking the streets,
a woman combing her hair.
Can this make music in your head?
Can you whistle hot tunes
to educate the barbarians?
These lines took decades to etch free,
the heart’s illiterate,
the map is torn.
Someone I learn to recognise,
cries out at Kurtz, thrusts skulls aside,
lets the floodwaters pour.
–For Adrienne Rich–

Summary

1. Illiterate Heart is at once a sophisticated literary production and a

journey through the workings of colonial and patriarchal pedagogy; the
construction of feminine gender and the violence of its inscription on
the female body; the possibilities and challenges of self-fashioning for
the postcolonial migrant woman.
2. In Illiterate Heart the formation of identity through language within
conditions of patriarchy and colonization is vividly illustrated.
Alexander exposes the violence of colonial pedagogy through the
imposition of a colonial language.
3. Clearest in the title poem is the painful disconnect between the reading
Indian body and symbolic colonial body imaged by the blond-haired-
blue-eyed Tom and Bess in a textbook, itself the figure of pedagogical
colonial discourse. We see how colonial ideology persists in
postcolonial India -- how long after 1947 the subject is defined by
colonial predicates, how postcolonial Asians are constituted through
colonial language and images of whiteness still, and how, because of
colonization, for many Indians, English remains the language of desire
-- of entry, promotion, transport. Thus, while using English, Alexander
also critiques the continued institutionalization of that language in
contemporary India.
4. The twofold tyranny of colonization and patriarchy is
compellingly rendered in the title poem, "Illiterate Heart."
During English lessons as a child, Alexander reflects, "My
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body flew apart: / wrist, throat, elbow, thigh, / . . . then utter

stillness as a white sheet / dropped on nostrils and neck" (66).
Historically, colonization is enforced through pedagogy --
through the compulsory acquisition of a colonial language
which metaphorically "breaks up" the subject's body and her
sense of self. The child of the poem must navigate multiple
languages: " It is the "harsh tutelage" of colonial pedagogy that
the poet writes of in order to free self and reader from that
"cage of script" (67).
5. She shows how colonial and postcolonial subjects are made,
violated and trapped by language, how language inscribes
identity and breaks it apart,. Three languages loom large in the
poet's self and psyche -- English, French and Malayalam.
6. The self fashioned here is inseparable from her native and
colonial languages, ". . . stuck forever at the accidental edge. //
O the body in parts, / bruised buttress of heaven!" (67).
7. However, by using these languages, by creating poetry with
them, she binds body and self into a unified whole: "These
lines took decades to etch free, / the heart's illiterate, / the map
is torn. // Someone I learn to recognize, / cries out at Kurtz,
thrusts skulls aside, / let's the floodwaters pour" (68).
8. Returning to a familiar trope in her work -- birth -- we see that
language is both "painful" and "heavenly" since it is inscribed
violently through dominating forces and is the means by which
the self is conceived, written, revealed: born.
9. Intense autobiographical poem about her emotional disconnect
with her native language and culture because of the imposition
of colonial language.
10. Her identity is split between different cultures but none of it is
separable from her; she has to navigate through this painful
hybridity.
11. She had to learn English instead of Malayalam.

Themes
Search for identity, alienation, exile and loss, language as self definition, colonialism