Fault Lines: A Memoir

by Meena Alexander

Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Meena Alexander’s memoir traces her evolution as a postcolonial writer from a privileged childhood in India to a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan and then to England and New York City. In this tenth-anniversary edition of Fault Lines, this Alexander challenges the assumptions of life as a South Asian American woman writer in a post-9-11 world. With poetic insight and an honesty that will galvanize readers—both familiar and new—Alexander reveals her difficult recovery from a long-buried childhood trauma that revolutionizes the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, of her writing process and the meaning of memoir, and of her very self, now and before.

Meena Alexander is a poet and professor of English and creative writing at Hunter College and the City University of New York.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Poetry, Feminism, Asian American, Book Club

344 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Seven years ago, I undropped myself back into college for my last year of undergrad, putting my newfound priorities into practice in terms of the classes I took, the jobs I applied to, and the books I checked out, the last of which involved churning through as many underread works by women of color that my university's thirteen libraries granted me access to under non-excessively arduous conditions. Alexander's Nampally Road was one of them, and while my effort to showcase it to the broader populace on this particular site seems to have been less than useless, it left a strong enough mark on my own mind that I could hardly believe it when, amongst the multivariated yet mostly unfamiliar flurry of South Asian literature that my regular book sale was able to put out before once again withdrawing into the realm of individual personal appointments, I spotted something, aka this memoir, that I actually recognized. After hushing the half of my brain still betrothed to past Eurocentric literary training, I slotted this in to my classics reading challenges, and reading it for the past just over the week turned out to be just what I needed. You see, after years of forcing myself into the bit of grappling with hellacious amounts of multiplicity in forms both paperback and hardcover, I've come to crave such that attains the heights of the most "difficult" texts, but doesn't pretend as if whiteness and its banal spawns are the end all of what can be complicated, confabulated, esotericized, and Alexander's work is one of those rare pieces that doesn't pretend as if there is an unnavigable breach between the world-bending anthologies of Susie J. Tharu and the opium dreams of certain Romanticist white boys. Lord knows I didn't grasp every single non-footnoted reference or non-Western context, and the entire section on Sudan showcases yet another part of the world that I've been obtuse about for far too long, but the language, the themes, the drive and, most importantly, the refusal to throw the baby out with the bathwater that so many diasporic narratives resort to makes this a piece that mixes delight of the senses with engagement of the intellect at a much higher ratio than most heavily annotated works out there are able to sustain. As such, of course the ratings for this work on this site are going to be a disaster both in terms of average quality and overall quantity, but I suppose that's the price one pays for synthesizing a world beyond the hegemony of the WASP modern day.

At base level, you could call this a memoir. The thread starts with an instigating creative moment for the piece (likely chosen for convenience rather than actuality, but the writing works so hard at explicating so many other inexplicabilities that it's fine the way it is), moves to grandparents, then parents, then country, then countries, then education, then professionalism, then "flown the coop," then settling down, then back again to the home country, all with a convoluted thread of femininity, creativity, culture, and history running through the many multiplicities of love and conformity, freedom and threat. It's a writing that glories in the wealth of India and its values both before and after Partition, and yet Alexander still left, still avoided an arranged marriage, still bypassed the STEM that many a South Asian American is shoved into by way of the exigencies of US capitalism, making for a life and a subsequent breakdown, the titular fault lines as it were, that is rather understandable when considering the work as a whole. It's a work that assumes one has the sort of appreciation for tribulations under postcolonialism and monumental figures such as Audre Lorde that begets lifelong learning rather than what is spat out by the latest DEI seminar, so while one can certainly trace a linearity throughout the pages, sections shift from meditations on Edgar Allen Poe to the author's own experiences with giving birth with little warning and little accommodation of "Western" viewpoints. For me, it just so happened that the prose style and the intellectual cross-analyses were just what the doctor ordered, so I enjoyed myself as much as one can with something that's just shy of experimental and draws upon five times as many languages as one is personally fluent in and more than that number of countries than one has personally resided in. What separates Alexander's writing from that of so many others is the lack of insisting on a "right" ontology of it all, whether it be narratological framework or normalized cultural point of view, which makes for some difficult wranglings with subjects such as bride burning when there is no white knight Euro nation waiting in the wings to swoop in and disaster capitalism it all into something readers of the New York Times no longer have to express hysterical concern about. So, as I said, not for everyone, but certainly a lot more holistically vital to modern concerns than much of what gets the most social traction these days.

So, if you're looking for a self-help guide of how to deal with the Indian caste system, or want a frame of view that doesn't explicitly compare and contrast a venerated religious figure in India and a homeless person in the land of the free and the home of the brave, this isn't the piece that is going to help you stop being racist to your colleagues in the IT department. What you'll find instead is a record of a life that was fortunate enough to amass a multifarious immensity of creativity intellectuality and unfortunate enough to pursue the life of an intellectual in the kind of body that many a hegemony still deems a diversity quotient, and while it's not one that explicitly deals with queer themes, it refreshes in a similarly complicated fashion. In any case, if I'm fortunate enough to come across any more Alexander works in a similarly spontaneous manner, I won't be spending much, if any, time quibbling over whether to purchase it or not before it's safe in my basket. Unburied this and underread that, but man, there's so much of that sort of stuff that I got through out of sheer obstinance than anything else, so it's nice to find a writer who's already in tune with my priorities and projects without my having to contort myself much. It's not going to do much for my hiring viability, but if the last two years has taught me anything, it's the consequences of putting project before the people and assuming science will eventually give into capitalism. So, read this if you're looking for a perspective of the world that doesn't believe in the fairytale that everything of value came into being less than 250 years ago. It's not going to get you trending on Twitter, but I consider being able to wrangle a bit of piece of mind from this murderously chaotic, insipidly grotesque, and still magnificently promising world of ours worth it.

Once an ordinary girl-child like me, she had taught herself whatever skills she had, learnt to use them in her own way, and set herself up as her own authority so that in her unmitigated gluttony—strictly directed at small rocks and stones and soil—she became a female icon, creator of a stern discipline, perfector of an art

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a joy to pick up this book again after so many years. This book revolves around the theme of establishing one’s self, an identity independent of one’s surroundings. “I am, a woman cracked by multiple migrations. Uprooted so many times she can connect nothing with nothing” (3). As Alexander writes, “I am a poet writing in America. But American poet?. . . An Asian-American poet then?. . . Poet tout court?. . . woman poet, a woman poet of color, a South Indian woman who makes up lines in English. . . A Third World woman poet. . .?” (193). Alexander searches for her own identity and self-creation amidst a world that strives to define, identify, and label people. I can relate, creating an identity; fighting against definitions demanded by greater society; and, also, fighting against traditions and definitions enforced within the community.

[Fran Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

such interesting ideas of one's sense of self created, broken, confused by living in different cultures & written beautifully--however, sometimes the details were a bit overwhelming and I felt flooded. I definitely do recommend this book.

[Sue Danskin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some memoirs are difficult to read this was one of them

[Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing story and one of the best writers

[Sriya Prathuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book with rich and creative prose

A powerful excerpt:
“My ethnicity as an Indian American or, in broader terms, an Asian American…requires, a resolute fracturing of sense: a splintering of older ways of being…But does this mean that faced with the multiple anchorages that ethnicity provides…I can juggle and toss and shift and slide, words, thoughts, actions, symbols, much as a poor conjurer I once saw in the half darkness of the Columbus Circle subway stop? Can I become just what I want? So this is the land of opportunity, the America of dreams? I can make myself up and this is the enticement, the exhilaration, the compulsive energy of America. But only up to a point. And the point, the sticking point, is my dark female body. I may try the voice-over bit, the words-over bit, the textual pyrotechnic bit, but my body is here, now, and cannot be shed. No more than any other human being can shed her or his body and still live. And this brings me to the next point about ethnicity in America…Ethnicity for such as I am comes into being as a pressure, a violence from within that resists such fracturing. It is and is not fictive. It rests on the unknown that seizes you from behind, in darkness. In place of the hierarchy and authority and decorum that I learnt as an Indian woman, in place of purity and pollution, right hand for this, left hand for that, we have an ethnicity that breeds in the perpetual present, that will never be wholly spelt out…The bigger hunk of what needs to be told,...comes with rage, with the overt acknowledgement of the nature of injustice. The struggle for social justice, for human dignity, is for each of us. Like ethnicity, like the labor of poetry, it is larger than any single person, or any single voice. It transcends individualism. It is shaped by forces that well up out of us, chaotic, immensely powerful forces that disorder the brittle boundary lines we create, turn us towards light, a truth, whose immensity, far from being mystical - in the sense of a pure thing far away, a distance shining - casts all our actions into relief, etches our lines into art.”

[Natalie Allen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't usually abandon a book, but I just couldn't focus on this book. Biographies are hard enough, and this one is by a poet. It was too much.