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Away! far away! from that comfort zone, the diaspora may take ages to establish and build a house of his/her own that promises a shelter to the long-struggling, tired and relentless seeker. This shelter is the home that takes form out of words, out of language; a language made from the piecemeal; some words from the past(memories and desires), some from the present, some from the desired future(hope) .
For some, words are the medium of joking, chatting, communicating that are the parts of daily mundane routine. But for a diaspora, it's the very retreat, the very place where he/she flows backward and forth then backward and so on. Words infuse life into the otherwise latent thoughts of diaspora .The thoughts that were buried under the temporal dust of the prolonged sufferings, age-long suppressions. They unleash the dreams once seen paving the avenues to the future hopes and desires.
Meena Alexander, being one of the South Asian American woman writer, has been through such tumultuous past with multiple place-shifts resulted in various dilemmas including that of the identity. The multiple voyages left her with palimpsests of memories and desires. Since then, she has been travelling and writing to soothe herself, to reach the identity for herself. By scribbling, jotting down her experiences, her unspoken longings, desires, she embarks upon a literary journey in the emancipation of the identity that is fluid, uncertain, obfuscating until today.
Her life is a collage of multiple voyages that exposed her to variants of experiences, good and bad, sweet and sour; that put her among a kind of an uncanny world of different people with different basics of thinking, morals, attitude and perspective. Her life has been a passage and so is her literary rendering of her experiences: in parts. For her, writing does a repairing work for a person. It proves a shelter for the mind oscillating between past and present, memory and desire .Alexander asserts, " The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes, writing can work toward preparation, making a sheltering space for the mind."
But, at a time the writing also became a difficult task for her, for she was forced into learning the language of the rulers: English. She felt suffocated. She had to struggle to "pierce through and tear it open to make it supple and fluid enough to accommodate the murmuring of her heart". She considered English the language of violence. It was a shock to her creative life. She could feel how "the postcolonial machine of education she was given was cutting off her words from the very wellsprings of desire". The very expression evokes the picture of a foetus being cut away from its mother's protective womb-shelter, crushing along all its hope and desire to survive .But then, she realized the very language as the medium of her expression, for English is inculcated so deeply in her since the childhood, she cannot do away with it.
The technique of stream of consciousness has been deployed in her poetry. One will find the blend of the past and present so beautifully rendered in lyrics. Language allows her go deep down into the past saga and relives moments attainable only in her memories. Language allows her create a world where she meets her people. Her present suddenly gets immersed in the past. Her poetry arouses the images of her loved once. In her 'Port Sudan' from her poetry collection Illiterate Heart, she recounts,
I hear my father's voice on the phone.
He wants me to come from America to see him
he does not want to die and be put in the earth
Later, in the poem she remembers her father,
my sweet father: who held me high above the waters
of the Red Sea when I was five,
who saw a white ship docking at Port Sudan
Past is left behind, but Meena carries it in her memories. The memories sometimes evokes a sense of joy- the joy of togetherness, of the family affection she received both from her maternal and paternal sides; of the play with sisters and cousins; the pebbles; the colourful chappals etc. These such memories bring joy onto her face for a moment, but it fills her another moments with longings and desires- desire to go back to her people, to the place, her childhood. In some of the poems she can be seen complaining and reversing the time wheel so as to change what happened: she had to leave Kerala when she was not even five; she turned five on the ship going to Sudan. And realisation of the fact that she cannot reverse the time brings disillusionment. She leans against words to solace herself sometimes saying things she ever wanted to say .She fetches help from words to complain. On the forceful teaching of script to her, she reacts in her poem Illiterate Heart ,
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 blocked in a cage of script
This world is her home that contains her birth place Allahabad, her native place Kerala, Khartoum, United Kingdom, and New York in America where she now resides and all those places visited and being visited by her. All these places, their experiences, their people are put altogether in her literary world. She arranges a meeting of people belonging to two different ages at one place. Meeting of her maternal grandmother and the poet Bruce is made possible in her poem 'Migrant Memory' from her collection of poetry Birthplace with Buried Stones where,
Proust approaches wrapped in a Fortuny robe.......
Two peacocks woven in silk
Sip from a vase set in a field emblazoned
With syllables of Sanskrit.
She leans against his shoulder ...
The role of memory becomes significant in surviving and jostling through the multiple migrations and place shifts. It works towards her imaginative construction and reconstruction of her originary home/lands. It gives meaning to and hold together the identities which have been fragmented by spatial and temporal displacement. Struck by an array of memories of her childhood under the love and affection of her grandparents along with the parental care, and her stay in different cities in India, she opens her sore heart to pour out the pain which has reached the brim. She decides and is determined to write her heart out.
She loans words to express her bafflement on her shifting to America. Her shift to America puts her into a baffling situation. She is in America though, she is very much aware of her roots and misses it and calls it to take her with it so that she can relive those times again. In her poem 'She Hears A Gold Flute' from the poetry collection Illiterate Heart, she says,
I am walking over snow
no, not toward you
but toward that place
where the hills are blue.
Why would she have to keep writing? The memories alive in pieces perturb her. She has to vent them out to feel light, free of the edgy past that lingers and haunts. Though, identifying with the subjects in Wordsworth's poetry was difficult for Meena, but the theory of Wordsworth on poetry is working perfectly for her. The moments, experiences with the loved once are recollected in Meena's present life. They flash at once before her. The fragments in the terms of memories make her feel empty of the identity, of place of belonging. She has to fill this void, this emptiness. How would she do that? she would have to write the memories out in an attempt to establish a relation between the past and the present. She has to fill this space, this bay-gap.
She loans words to show her awareness of being a woman and a dark .Being in America has made her realize of her race and ethnicity time and again. She is made realize here that staying in America, speaking their language (English) will not be making any change. She is a dark woman and will remain so. She is the other and will remain so. Under the American clothing, she is the same dark female body through her poems she tries to pour out this heavy thought in order to lighten her heart
Under her coat
the woman wears a sari,
under her boots
her skin is dark
Later, in the poem she pleads her people to approach her and embrace her. She moves to words in this helpless situation where her family, friends and her place which is belongs to are away from her. If she cannot, her words will reach them and find some solace for her:
Come give me your hand,
my skin is so dark,
my heart is so hot
on this great hill of bones
Meena's predicament reminds one of Kamala Das' Hot Noon in Malabar where she recalls her experiences in her home in Malabar."The beggars with whining voices" begging in their characteristic voices, "the men who come from hills with parrots" and future-cards, the bangle-sellers and many other things which were part of her daily life in Malabar. She craves to be back in her home. She laments that "I so far away", she is now living so far away from her home in Malabar. The painful yearning to go back and experience those familiar sights again is evoked in her poem.
The words come to Meena's rescue in the moments of emptiness, pain, nostalgia, and loneliness. She fills that void within with all sorts of events, people, thoughts and imagination only through words and endeavours to make herself feel at home in this world that she creates around with words. The wonderland knitted with her words felicitates her with all sorts of people, moments, memories she desires to relive
WORKS CITED
Alexander, Meena. Birthplace with Buried Stones. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/NorthWestern University Press, 2013.
-. Fault Lines: A Memoir. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Feminist Press, 2003.
-. Illiterate Heart. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/NorthWestern University Press, 2002.
-.The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press, 1996.
Das, Kamala. A Hot Noon In Malabar. 123HelpMe.com. 07 Jul 2016.
<http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=160763>.
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