Night-Scene, the Garden

by Meena Alexander

poem-play, rich in poetic realism

32 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1992

About the author

Meena Alexander was an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She was the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Antilibrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meena Alexander, Night-Scene, The Garden (1992).
:
Meena Alexander wrote this wonderful narrative poem in 1992 based on Chekhov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. Alexander writes that the entire action of the poem is set in Tiruvella, a town in Kerala, India. The poem is a dialogue between two characters—mother and daughter—who recount the events surrounding their house from the year when the daughter was seven. The poem is actually about the house where they live but which hasn’t been theirs for a while. The mother recalls the violence that haunts the house—communal violence, the civil war in Sri Lanka, familial violence, the mad aunt Chinna, the old grandmother—as old as the earth on which she defecated in the darkness all here life, etc.

Their house has often been stormed by squatters during political upheavals. The family would often return to see their private belongings soiled, destroyed, and desecrated. The trauma of witnessing cow dung, human excrements, and other waste in the private space opens up the floodgates of narrative force in the poem. The poem turns into a raw expression of poetic realism, violence, and trauma. The plot (only if there is one) revolves around this squatter aesthetics, soiling of private possessions, and the subsequent poetics of salvage! Feel the rage of poetic recollection spill from line to line, from page to page as enjambments relentlessly conjure up hurricanes of past violence! Simply brilliant stuff! 🔥🔥

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[Abigail J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and beautiful.