A while back Stuart and I agreed that celebrating Women's History Month needn't be a purely American thing, nor a thing reserved purely for historians, so I thought I would post a bit about some recent work I've been doing on American, transnational poet, Meena Alexander:
My interest in her work is quite recent, so I am definitely not an expert on her poetry or scholarly practice yet, but I am currently reading as much as I can of her and on her work. The whole thing started, as it often does, with three apparently unrelated incidents.
First off, the launch of the excellent journal on poetry, Studio - which featured Meena Alexander in their very first issue. They reprint a lot of good selections from her 2004 collection, Raw Silk, as well as supplementary material in the form of a very rich talk on those poems and their writing which Alexander gave at Shippensberg U., and later at Dartmouth - titled "Fragile Places: A Poet’s Notebook".
Second, I was asked to be the external examiner for a superb MA-thesis on Indian, transnational poetry in English. The student had done a beautiful job in presenting his findings, had a good grasp of theory and of close reading, so we of course gave him the top grade available. One of his subjects was the poetry of Meena Alexander, which he read as an example of what Homi Bhabha calls unhomely texts.
Third (and according to Freud, the uncanny part of repetition is when things repeat themselves not once, but twice), I received a call for papers from a friend of mine who regularly puts on great conferences with themes such as 'Chaos and Order', or 'Pluralities of Interpretation'. This time Daniel in Reims wanted papers on what he proposed to call the 'Cultural Kernel', asking/stating provocatively: “The question is: how can we determine when our understanding of a literary work stops? There always seems to be a gap that cannot be bridged, a kernel that will always resist us.” For me it seemed a short leap to start thinking of Alexander as a producer of texts that ought to, for me at least, have a number of culturally specific elements that might be investigated as 'kernels' resisting interpretation. Thus, I was all set to propose a paper on her work, and I was accepted and in fact presented my work last week in France...
Even a cursory glance at Alexander's bio will peak your interest in her: She was born in Allahabad in 1951 to Syrian Christian parents, raised in the Sudan, educated in English-speaking contexts there (BA in English and French from Khartoum University) and in Nottingham, England (PhD in English), returned to India for a number of years, married another Indian academic, and is now residing in the USA, where she is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and CUNY in NYC. Her linguistic history is, if possible even more fascinating: Mother tongue: Malayalam, with a knowledge of Hindi on the side - in Khartoum, exposure to Arabic and French - after return to India, exposure to other Indian languages - throughout a tendency to exploit English as lingua franca, but not stopping at that: developing an acute poetic ability in that language too...
I knew that in Alexander I had found a subject that was extremely different from my own background as a male, white, European academic and that, given my reading protocol with its foundation in those identity positions and difference discourses, I might well hit a few interpretative bumps in my reading of her texts. As it turned out I was to be positively surprised...
Alexander is a very political individual and poet. Her work speaks out for the weak and marginal groups and individuals. She is also extremely conscious of her native country's troubled history and political conflicts. Raw Silk is written in the aftermath of the violence of two Septembers: Her adopted country, the USA's 9/11 trauma, and her native province, Gujarat's ethnic unrest in September 2002. The result is erudite, compassionate poetry about the effect of violence on victims and poets alike, and the poems weave an intricate intertextual web with precursor poets, politicians and philosophers from India: Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Laureate, 1913), Mahatma Ghandi, and Sankara, the 8th C. Vedantic philosopher and religious teacher...
The poem I mainly analyze is "Fragile Places" which closes the Raw Silk collection. I cannot share my entire paper with you before its eventual publication, but here is an excerpt from the analytical part, where I endeavour to give a 'classically founded interpretation' of this particular poem and the collection as a whole:
The key poem in the collection is “Fragile Places”, which is set partly in Gujarat where Mahatma Gandhi lived and partly in Kerala where the 8th century Vedantic philosopher Sankara was born. These two figures, both associated with intense religious and pacifist feelings and ideas, function to structure the poem. Sankara, whose desire was to revitalize Hinduism and point to the identity between self and the whole, figured as the highest (and ultimately only) deity Brahman, is addressed at the poem’s beginning and end, so that the poet speaker’s desire to hear the words of Sankara comes to frame the whole poem. The effect is heightened by the use of a quote by Sankara, “The world is a forest on fire,” as the poem’s motto. The reading protocol an experienced reader of poetry will invoke here is to expect that the motto will set the tone of the poem, as is quickly borne out by the poem’s insistence on violent images involving fire, culminating with the references to the burning child in the second to last group of couplets. Similarly the custom of addressing an absent interlocutor, akin to invoking a distant deity will be familiar from much Romantic poetry and the whole set of conventions concerning the ode. Therefore one experiences little difficulty in encountering the beginning exhortations of the poet speaker addressed to Sankara, pleading for shelter, refuge, protection: “carry me through the house of silt/ the low slung bone,/ wind me in raw silk” – and ultimately insight: “Who dares to burn/ with the stamp of love?/ Words glimmer/ then the slow/ march to sentences./ Sankara speak to me.”
The role of Gandhi in the poem is less clear as he is not referred to explicitly. Only the place of the poem’s setting indicates his role in the poem and the culturally competent reader will associate the location of Gandhi’s ashram in Gujarat with the site of the ethnic unrest the poem describes. The ashram would historically be just such a place of refuge as the poet speaker calls for, but in other poems in the collection with the give-away title “Letters to Gandhi”, the nation’s father is gently chastised for not having influenced his inheritors sufficiently, and the shame of his old ashram barring the doors for Muslims seeking shelter from violence, rape and murder is pointed out. Gandhi’s grandson is also mentioned in the notes to these poems, as well as in Alexander’s talk on the poems.
Yet another figure ghosts the poem “Fragile Places”, this time through a more conventional intertextuality, as his poetry is quoted in the Alexander poem. This figure is Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel Laureate, who is remembered and revered in India along the same lines as the philosopher and the politician discussed above. The biography of Tagore at the Nobel Prize Organization’s website emphasizes some similarities between Sankara and Tagore’s origins, mentioning his father’s sect which “attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads.” It is well-known that Tagore and Gandhi were close friends, and we thus have a closely linked trinity of men from the past history of India, all representing similar ideals of unity, peace and non-sectarian beliefs, all present in the poem. The quote from Tagore is: “I lay with you at the water’s edge/ a red rose blossomed in my breast.” The complex symbol of the red rose blossoming is decodable as feelings of erotic love (“I lay with you”), or as agape (love for one’s fellow man), or as the blood of the heart running out of a dying man’s body after a stabbing or shooting, or as yet another image of the fires that otherwise crowd the poem. These readings are all fairly conventional, and intertextual precursors including at least Dante, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot could be invoked here. Again, while the symbol cannot be decoded in an entirely unitary way, the gap presented by the text is not unbridgeable – rather there are almost too many bridges crossing this particular gap, which then hardly constitutes an uncrackable kernel.
If one now turns to the presence of difference discourses in the poem, one is surely not disappointed, nor particularly surprised to find an implicit dichotomy between the three great men, who are ultimately all portrayed as powerless to influence the course of history in a non-violent direction (the two Septembers’ violence was perpetrated regardless of their lasting presence on Indian soil, and Tagore’s words displayed on giant posters in Kolkata have little effect), and the female poet speaker and her references to her matriarchal lineage back to her grandmother whose house the speaker inherits (grandmother’s birthplace is the same as Sankara’s). Another important figure in the poem is the woman who responds to the burning of the child by stopping in her washing of the rice in her kitchen and turning to write instead. This mirror image of the poet is more of an insider to the region, and her donning the writer’s mantle is a sign of hope and her inscriptions a guarantee of the lasting memory of the events: “Words glimmer/ then the slow/ march to sentences.” It is therefore clear that we have a case of the gender difference discourse playing out in a form of reversal in Alexander’s poem. Nothing new or challenging here.
Likewise her figuration of the transnational self is a variation over the in-group/out-group dichotomy that is typical of the national difference discourse. The poet speaker has a foot in each camp: she is rooted in India, yet has left the country only to return and mourn its state. Her presence is problematized as not entirely authentic. While she claims: “I have come to ground/ in my own country,/ by the Pamba’s edge” and her grandmother’s house is her inheritance, there is still a doubt spurred on by her role as an interloper. The poem’s words on identity illustrate this dilemma: “Unable to reconcile those that are scattered/ with those bound in fragile places/ we turn to where alms/ are collected for the poor,/ identity pulled apart/ on the tongs of war.” Scattered, yet bound as the migrant figures are, it is the unpleasant tool of war that creates the identity split in the poet speaker’s tenuous ‘we’.
As you can begin to see, I was not finding the uncrackable cultural kernels I had been expecting in Meena Alexander's work. I read her memoirs, Fault Lines, where she reflects on her multicultural background, tells stories of her grandparents whose house she has inhereted, and who received Ghandi as a visitor. I read her poetry and reflections in The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience where her academic analysis enriches her poetic practice. I read more of her poems, including her most recent collection, Quickly Changing River, from 2008. I still feel that I understand her very well...
I look at some of the many good resources online for Alexander: This interview, this overview of her work, another blog interview, Ruth Maxey's Kenyon Review interview... All this reading adds more to my understanding of her.
At the conference my colleagues did not disagree with my interpretation of her poem, nor with my observation that her knowledge of and mastery of Western poetry in all its forms, conventions and intertextualities helped us all to engage with her work. On the question of how I felt as a white, male, not-quite-dead European after having interpreted her work so 'fully', I had to answer that such an experience inevitably makes you feel like God in some 'omnipotent' way. Of course, in that context, we must always remember that God is a black, lesbian woman....
