CU-MA-Eng-SEM-IV-Specialization I - Postcolonial Poetry-Second Draft

MASTER OF ARTS ENGLISH SEMESTER IV POSTCOLONIAL POETRY

CHANDIGARH UNIVERSITY Institute of Distance and Online Learning SLM Development Committee Prof. (Dr.) H.B. Raghvendra Vice- Chancellor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, Punjab:Chairperson Prof. (Dr.) S.S. Sehgal Registrar Prof. (Dr.) B. Priestly Shan Dean of Academic Affairs Dr. Nitya Prakash Director – IDOL Dr. Gurpreet Singh Associate Director –IDOL Advisors& Members of CIQA –IDOL Prof. (Dr.) Bharat Bhushan, Director – IGNOU Prof. (Dr.) Majulika Srivastava, Director – CIQA, IGNOU Editorial Committee Prof. (Dr) Nilesh Arora Dr. Ashita Chadha University School of Business University Institute of Liberal Arts Dr. Inderpreet Kaur Prof. Manish University Institute of Teacher Training & University Institute of Tourism & Hotel Management Research Dr. Manisha Malhotra Dr. Nitin Pathak University Institute of Computing University School of Business © No part of this publication should be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the authors and the publisher. SLM SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR CU IDOL STUDENTS 2 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

First Published in 2021 All rights reserved. No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Chandigarh University. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this book may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. This book is meant for educational and learning purpose. The authors of the book has/have taken all reasonable care to ensure that the contents of the book do not violate any existing copyright or other intellectual property rights of any person in any manner whatsoever. In the event the Authors has/ have been unable to track any source and if any copyright has been inadvertently infringed, please notify the publisher in writing for corrective action. 3 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

CONTENTS Unit – 1 Meena Alexander: The Writer ................................................................................. 5 Unit - 2 Meena Alexander: Birthplace With Buried Stones From Raw Meditations On Money She Speaks: A School Teacher From South India ................................................................ 29 Unit – 3 R. Parthasarthy: The Writer .................................................................................. 45 Unit – 4 R. Parthasarthy: “Homecoming”, “Exile” .............................................................. 76 Unit – 5 Gabriel Okara: “You Laughed And Laughed And Laughed”, “Piano And Drums” 88 Unit – 6 Judith Wright: “The Old Prison, Five Senses”, “Magpies”,“To A Child” ............. 103 Unit – 7 A.D.Hope:“TheDeathOfTheBird”........................................................................ 120 Unit – 8 Standish O’ Grady-: “Winter In Lower Canada” .................................................. 141 Unit – 9 Derek Walcott: “Ruins Of A Great House”, “A City’s Death By Fire”, “Far Cry From Africa”..................................................................................................................... 155 Unit – 10 Claude Mc Kay: “Enslaved”, “To One Coming North”, “Dawn In New York”, “In Bondage” .......................................................................................................................... 195 4 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 1MEENA ALEXANDER: THE WRITER STRUCTURE 1.0 Learning Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Postcolonial poets and works 1.3 Author Biography 1.4 Meena Alexander as a Diasporic Writer 1.5 Diasporic Consciousness in Meena Alexander’s Poetry 1.6 Stylistic and Thematic Presentation in Meena Alexander’s Works 1.7 Summary 1.8 Keywords 1.9 Learning Activity 1.10 Unit End Questions 1.11 References 1.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Understand the importance of postcolonial writers  Analyze the characteristics of Meena Alexander  Interpret the importance of works of Alexander 1.1 INTRODUCTION Postcolonialism and postcolonial writers: Post colonialism, as a theoretical procedure is used to read, interpret and critique the cultural practices of colonialism. As a theory it focuses on the question of race within colonialism and shows how the optic of race enables the colonial powers to represent, reflect, refract and make visible native cultures in inferior ways. Postcolonialism is thus, a term for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies which designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of colonial practices. As broadly agreed by a wide range of postcolonial writers and critics, Postcolonialism is that which questions, overturns and critically refracts colonial authority. It refers to those theories, texts, 5 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

political strategies and modes of activism that engage in such questioning which aims to challenge structural inequalities and brings about social justice. The postcolonial discourse includes a convoluted discussion and understanding of the contemporary literary discourses of diaspora(s), which have a progressive as well as an intransigent streak in them. In the following pages an attempt is being made to discuss:  the concept of diaspora in the framework of postcolonial criticism and  to identify the precise nature of diasporic postcolonial experiences and to locate them in the writings of diasporic women writers chiefly Meena Alexander. When the postcolonial framework is applied to the dialogue of diaspora it exhibits the progressive and reactionary forms of the diaspora, centering on the idea of one’s homeland as very real space from which alone a certain level of redemption is possible. Homeland is the ‘desh’ in Hindi to which all the other unfamiliar/familiar lands are ‘videsh’. In the context of this homeland and hostland, the idea of diaspora and its various features arise. It is ‘the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland’ or ‘people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location’, or ‘people settled far from their ancestral homelands’. Postcolonialism reminds us that we are living in a world that has been profoundly shaped by the colonial experience. There are so many bad outcomes of that; it becomes a de-spiriting task to catalogue them. Yet the continued connection between, say, Britain and India seems, from the point of view of the gospel, an example of redemption. Not that it excuses the history of British imperialism, but it takes something which had much that was evil and exploitive and uses it for blessing – a process at which, if the irreverence may be pardoned, God is very good. Postcolonial writers have been marginalized in the discussion of postcolonial literatures because the overarching paradigm for reading postcolonial literature has been that of mimesis. The word ‘diaspora’ has come to refer to the historical mass-dispersions of people with common roots, particularly movements of an involuntary nature such as the expulsion of Jews from the Middle East, the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the southern Chinese during the coolie slave trade, or the century-long exile of the Messenians under Spartan rule. In the western common knowledge as expressed by Martin Baumann in the book Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, the notion of exile is “predominantly bound to the experience of the Jewish people in the first millennium BCE. Exile is a term used by Jews of that time in both geographical and theological semantics: it refers to a concrete land, far away from Israel-Palestine and Judea; and it refers to a fourfold theological scheme”. According to this, God renders upon the Jewish people into exile as punishment for breaking the law. As such, being forced into exile provides an explanation for the pitiful state. Jewish experience with exile started in the late 8th century BCE. The deported Jews were settled at 6 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the “Waters of Babylon”. They built houses and arranged for gardens and gradually integrated into Babylonian society. Religiously however, Jews warded off assimilation and maintained the tradition of their forefathers. The evolved Greek translation, the Septuagint (Third/Second Century BCE), coined the term ‘diaspora’ to address the various Jewish communities scattered all over the eastern Mediterranean (Baumann 20). In the postmodern age, diaspora writings have become popular and the diasporic women writers have special place in Indian Diasporic writings. The Greek noun ‘diaspora’ derives from the composite verb dia - and speirein, “adopting meanings to scatter, spread, disperse, be separated”. The term is now used in a more generalized sense to refer the migrant population along with their ways of life to the place of destination abroad. The postcolonial era is an era of „writing back. The postcolonial literature came into flourish with the colonial and imperial views of the coloniser and the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. It covers the broad area of race and home, gender and division, and space and identity with conflicts and contradictions. The postcolonial studies are mainly concerned with an age of cultural conflict and existential conflict. The cultural imperialism is a noteworthy fact in the poems of Rudyard Kipling like The White Man’s Burden (1899): “Take up the White Man’s Burden- In patience to abide, to veil the threat of terror, and check the show of pride; by open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain, to seek another’s profit, and work another’s gain.” The postcolonial era is an era of cultural imperialism and the search for home and identity. Colonialism and cultural imperialism give birth to dislocation and diaspora though colonialism mingles two cultures, one is native and the other is foreign and a hybrid culture is created. The colonial period is a period of suppression and domination. And the postcolonial period is a period of the issues of colonialism and cultural imperialism. The term post colonialism is related to „postcolonial theory‟ and „postcolonial literature‟. The postcolonial literature tries to explore the colonial issues and its impact on the social, political, economic and cultural aspects. It is also concerned with history and identity. Through the hand of colonialism there appear the issues of displacement and diaspora. The postcolonial studies deal with the home and identity with a view of dislocation and migration. The diasporic writers create a home and an identity of their own. They live in betweenness. It may be called a home of hybridity. They belong to the world that is the „Third World‟. This is mostly concerned with the significant discourse of the postcolonial literature with an emphasis on the cultural empowerment and identity as well as equality With a calculative view the postcolonial journey of the postcolonial and diasporic writer Meena Alexander, demands that she is not oblivious of her own rootlessness and dislocation. The idea and nature of displacement occupies an engraving position in her literary creations. She considers herself a minority in the sense of culture, race, location and identity. She belongs to the class of the minority of the theoretical brand „Diaspora. The diasporic writers 7 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

are those who leave their native land and settle in a foreign land. Alexander has settled in the New York City, America. She expresses herself:“In India no one asked if I were Asian or American Asian, here we are part of a minority.” The South Asian American diasporic writer Meena Alexander’s dislocation mostly dominates her poetry. The exploration of her poetic outburst demands her subjectivity and memory. Her poetic creation goes on with her embracement of the experiences of border and border crossing with lyricism. Her poetry is, at once, both silent and vibrant on the issues of her identity and entity. Her own dislocation and disconnection for the creation of poetry are the major combination of her literary career. Her creative world gives her a space of freedom, a graceful freedom that lessens her earthly burden of the painful experiences. And the productive spirit is „the great gift of poetry‟. Her own words in a conversation with LopamudraBasu, bear a testimony to her poetic power with the salient feature of lyricism: “It seems to me that the lyric poem is a place of extreme silence, which is protected from the world. To make a lyric poem you have to enter into a dream state. Yet, at the same time, almost by virtue of that disconnect, it becomes a very intense place to reflect on the world…. In the composition of poetry, something that is very difficult to face is brought within the purview of language, into a zone of images and is crystallized. And that act of crystallizing the emotion through the image actually has its own peculiar grace, which frees one, if only momentarily, of the burden of the experience. This seems to be the great gift of poetry.” Regarding her view, her poetry reveals that she, like each and every human being tries to escape the earthly anguish and pains, wishes to escape the bitter experiences of traditional home and identity, and dislocation and diasporic settlement. From this angle she may be considered as an escapist. And escapism is one of the most relevant and significant features of Romanticism on which she worked for her Ph.D. programme. Her research was published as Construction of Self Identity in the Early English Romantic Poets. Her poetic creation, research and personal experiences vividly strengthen the stereotype of her poetry woven with a fabric of escapism. The poetic creation of the diasporic writer Meena Alexander presents a clash of identity in between home and abroad and even within herself. Her journey of postcolonial life is full of experimental experiences. As it were she lives in an experimental land where she is always struggling to make a home but she is nostalgic. 1.2 POSTCOLONIAL POETS AND WORKS Walcott’s art arises from this schizophrenic situation, from a struggle between two cultural heritages which he has harnessed to create a unique creolized style. His early poetry booklets, published in the late 1940s with money borrowed from his mother, reveal a self-conscious apprentice determined to make what Walcott called verse “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlow and Milton.” English and American critics often have been ambivalent about his use of the Western literary tradition and Walcott has also drawn criticism from Caribbean commentators, who accuse him of neglecting native forms in favour of techniques 8 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

derived his colonial oppressors. To be sure, his early works seem overpowered by the voices of English poetry, and his entire oeuvre respects the traditional concerns of poetic form. But if his poetry demonstrates a significant relation to tradition, it also manifests an elegant blending of sources - European and American, Caribbean and Latino, classical and contemporary. Later works, including In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a poet who has learned his craft from the European tradition, but who remains mindful of West Indian landscapes and experiences. The task of Walcott as a young poet, one he undertook with an enthusiasm for both imitation and experimentation, was to develop an idiom adequate to his subject matter. The early exponents of Postcolonial Indian English Literature are Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan and so on. The writers of the modern age are Salman Rushdie, HanifKureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor and so on. The Postcolonial Indian English Literature gave enormous scope for the women writers. The women writers who received universal recognition are Nayantara Sehgal, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, JhumpaLahiri and so on. The women writers of the Postcolonial Indian English Literature, switched on to the microscopic themes of ‘alienation’, ‘poverty’, ‘isolation’ and ‘disillusionment’ in the familial lives of the Indian folk. Anita Desai’s first novel, “Cry the Peacock”, published in 1963, echoes the sufferings and agony of the Indian women folk. Maya, the woman protagonist of the novel, experiences an unhappy marital life. Maya has been married to a middle-aged lawyer named Gautama, who devotes much of his time to his career. The astrologer’ s prediction about Maya’s early demise, makes her nervous. She wants to enjoy life to the fullest, with this minimal time. However, all her sexual advances have a cold response from Gautama. In a sense of dejection, Maya is driven insane, which leads to Gautama’s tragic death. Maya’s sense of ‘alienation’ and ‘rootlessness’ reflects the plight of the entire Indian womenfolk. Postcolonial Literature Characteristics  Appropriation of Colonial Languages. Postcolonial writers have this thing they like to do.  Metanarrative. Colonizers liked to tell a certain story.  Colonialism.  Colonial Discourse.  Rewriting History.  Decolonization Struggles.  Nationhood and Nationalism. 9 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Valorization of Cultural Identity. 1.3. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, on February 17, 1951. She was raised in both India and the Sudan in North Africa. She received a bachelor's degree in French and English from Khartoum University and a doctorate degree in English from Nottingham University in England. Alexander's collections of poetry include Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books, 2018), Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books, 2013), Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books, 2008), Raw Silk (2004), and Illiterate Heart (2002), the winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her ninth collection, In Praise of Fragments, was published posthumously by Night boat Books in February 2020. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages including Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Swedish. Even her very first published poems were acts of translation written as a teenager in English, they were published in a Sudanese newspaper translated into Arabic. Her poems have also been set to music, most recently \"Acqua Alta\" by the Swedish composer Jan Sandstrom. Polyglot and sensual, Alexander's work has been influenced and mentored by the Indian poets Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das, as well as the American poets Adrienne Rich and Galway Kinnell. Her poems frequently confront the difficult issues of exile and identity, while still maintaining a generous spirit. About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston has said: \"Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted.\" Alexander was also the editor of Indian Love Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), the author of the novels Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997) and The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), a volume of poems and essays. Her works of criticism include Poetics of Dislocation (University of Michigan Press, 2009); Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989); and The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979). Her memoir, Fault Lines, was reissued by the Feminist Press in 2003 with a Coda composed after 9/11. She has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Arts Council of England, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Council for Research on Women, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at the University of Hyderabad, Fordham University and Columbia University's Writing Program. In 2014, she 10 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

was named a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. She was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She passed away on November 21, 2018. Meena Alexander is an award-winning author and scholar. Her new book of poetry Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) is forthcoming in Fall 2013. Her volumes of poetry include Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and set to music. She has written the acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines as well as two novels. She is author of the academic study Women in Romanticism and the book of essays Poetics of Dislocation. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Meena Alexander, being one of the South Asian American woman writers, 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. 11 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

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. With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander’s poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether reading Bashō in the Himalayas, or walking a city street, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war—we see the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander’s native India to New York City. We see traces of mythology, ritual, and other languages. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander’s poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard. Select Bibliography Poetry In Praise of Fragments (Nightboat Books, 2020) Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books, 2018) Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books, 2013) Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books, 2008) Raw Silk (2004) Illiterate Heart (2002) Prose Nampally Road (1991) Manhattan Music (1997) The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience 1.4 MEENAZ ALEXANDER AS A DIASPORIC WRITER As a diasporic writer, Alexander explores themes of memory, migration, Diaspora anddisplacement in her diasporic work. Her creative work lies at the intersection of post- colonialethnic American, and women's studies. Like her life, which has included multiple bordercrossings, her poems cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and generates interdisciplinary dialogues. Alexander is a genuine diasporic voice expressing her own life's 12 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

diasporic experiences in her poetry uprooting and exile, alienation and identity, migrant memories and traumas, separation and loneliness all the way from India to Sudan and USA. She is christened as Mary Elizabeth but she has been called \"Meena\" since her birth and in her teenage she officially changed her name from Marry to Meena. She states, \"I felt I had changed my name to what I already was, some truer self, stripped free of the colonial burden\" in her autobiography Fault Lines (74). Representing her own multi-lingual nature. “Fifteen years old in Khartoum, I changed my name to Meena, What everyone knew me as, But just as important to me, the name under which I started to write poems.” Meena Alexander is one of the foremost diasporic poets today. Her writing is lyrical, pageant and sensual, dealing with large themes including ethnic intolerance, terrorism, fanaticism and interracial tensions. Her poems are intensely self-conscious and with minimum of words, she evokes layers of meaning. For her, poetry has important role to play in modern violence ridden world. She says in an interview with Ruth Maxey in Kenyon Review: “In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some ways to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist.” As child, Meena wanted to be a circus performer after she had seen circus artists doing balancing acts in Gemini Circus. Then her grandfather and mother wanted her to be a medical doctor and her father who was a scientist encouraged her to be a physicist. However, Meena turned to poetry at the age of eleven or twelve. For her, it was the music of survival. She admits that there is an inner voice that speaks to her. She feels that there is a girl child that resides inside her and she refuses to die. She writes in a chapter titled Lyric in a time of Violence in Fault Lines: \"It seems to me that the lyric poem is a form of extreme silence, which is protected from the world. To make a lyric poem, I have to enter into a dream state. But at the same time, almost by virtue of that disconnect, it becomes a very intense location to reflect on the world.\" Meena Alexander’s poetry is marked by diasporic sensibility which finds highly emotion, charge expression in sensual, lyrical and metaphoric language. She has undergone multiple identities in multiple places. Her poems express her owns lived experiences-uprooting and exile, migrant memories traveling to different places in India, Sudan and America. She has lived in different cities and towns like Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune, Khartoum, London, New York, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Trivandrum etc. In her memoir Fault Lines she writes about ethnicity and writing of poetry. She asks herself: who am I? Where am I? When am I? These are the questions all diasporic writers are required to mix amidst violent densities of place. In modern times, world overlap, and one has co-existed in fluid diasporic world. The biggest challenge for a creative writing is to make a real integration between one's personal history and the experience in alien countries. Meena Alexander asks: “What does it mean to carry one's house on one's back”? As a poet, she has to explain whether she is a poet writing in America. She feels that everything that comes to her is hyphenated and incomplete. 13 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

She says that she is a women poet, a women poet of color, a south Indian Woman poet who makes up lines in English a past colonial language as she waits for the red lights to change on Broadway. The multicultural world in America has been described very poignantly in her poem News of the World. “We must always return to poems for new of the world or polish for the lack Strip it blocks it with blood the page is not enough unless the sun rises in. Meena Alexander says that Frantz Fanon speaks of the barbed wire that exists in a colonized state. She believes that this \"zone of occult instability” must be expressed in poetry of the diaspora which will act as a process of decolonization. The Asian Americans grapple with violence, disorder and injustice and they are bartered in capitalist society of the West. Meena Alexander says that in America, the diasporic poets and artists press against the barbed wire of the racialism. Meena Alexander says that people call poets 'the creators of that small, despised art\". As a poet, she picks up strands of memories and evokes them all. She feels that her ethnicity demands it. Past memories haunt her. In India, everything is colored with hierarchy, authority, and traditions. No one feels its burden. Only in America, she read about the pain of the post-colonial heritage and the sufferings of women in India she says: \"There is violence in the very language, American English that we have to face, even as we work to make it ours, decolonize it so that it will express the truth of bodies beaten and banned. After all, for such as we are the territories are not free. The world is not open. That endless space the emptiness of the American sublime to worse than a lie. It does ceaseless damages to the imagination. But it has taken me ten years in this country even to get to think it.” In America, she came face to face with subtle form of racism and violence. She felt that true poetry must figure out this violence and give expression to it. For a writer, there are many kinds of death for example the loss of one's language or the forgetfulness of the body. In her collection of poems House of a Thousand Doors, the past took the form of an ancestor, a grandmother figure. She wanted to tear herself free from the past, but it sucked her back in its vortex. Meena Alexander says that her ethnicity as an Indian American and in broader sense, an Asian American requires her to hold on to past resisting fracturing. For her, poetry has a higher role to play. She writes: \"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 shape by forces that well up out of us, chaotic, immensely powerful forces that disorder the brittle boundary lines we create, turn us towards a 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 out lines into art.” As a teenager in Khartoum, Meena kept journals that contained quotes from Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Wallace Stevens and her own poetry. Her mother insisted that women should accept the limitations imposed by their bodies and honor their femininity. Arranged marriage was a narrow gate that all women had to enter and learn certain skills required to run a 14 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

household. In Kozencheri, girls could not get out without proper escorts. They were often molested in marketplaces of Kerala. Meena had heard that sometimes women committed suicide to do away with their shameful bodies. These terrible images haunted her mind in her childhood. 1.5DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEENA ALEXANDER’S POETRY Meena Alexander is a prominent poet and one of the finest thinkers of Asian American aesthetics. She has published many volumes of poetry and been widely anthologized in journals. Meena Alexander is also a popular memoirist, fiction writer and academic. Currently she is an eminent Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A Few writers of Meena Alexander’s generation may claim her rich multicultural and multilingual experience. Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, raised in Kerala and Khartoum, educated in Sudan and Nottingham, UK, worked in Delhi and Hyderabad, India and finally settled in New York. She has received several honors, including an Altruss International Award (1973), the New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Award (1999), and a PEN Open Book Award (2002, for Illiterate Heart). Border crossings, both physical and psychological have molded Alexander’s personality, vision and writing. Alexander in Fault Lines has portrayed herself as ―a woman cracked by multiple migrations, uprooted so many times (who could) connect nothing with nothing‖ (3) and is rightly known as a significant voice of feminism. With her strong cultural roots in Kerala and mother tongue Malayalam language, rich colonial language English, and in addition literary influences of Das, Mahapatra, Desai and Rich, she has earned a respectable place among South Asian writers in English. Out of the trauma of multiple dislocations and multitude of experiences related to it, Alexander’s diasporic consciousness awakened. Further her multiple dislocations which resulted in confrontation with multiple cultures has transformed her into many souls, many voices in one dark body. Alexander in The Shock of Arrival elaborates Du Bois concept of double consciousness‖ when she explains her creative process: It is from the consciousness of unselving that I create my work. This consciousness reflects itself literally in Alexander’s hyphenated identities; everything that comes to me is hyphenated: a woman-poet, a woman- poet-of-color, a south-Indian woman-poet-of-color. Alexander constructs her multi-faceted hybrid identity through the process of uniting a splendidly nourished variety of literary genres like memoir, fiction, poetry, essays and also personal notes. Alexander reflects her multicultural life experience among diverse ethnic and religious communities belonging to four continents, in her post-colonial literary production, which are the outcome of her colonial and cultural wounds. Alexander herself admits that it is the pain of no one knowing my name that drives me to write. She discusses issues of location and dislocation, nostalgia, trauma of migrant memories, separation, alienation and loneliness 15 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

in her works. Themes involving Romanticism and Feminism have continued to claim Alexander’s critical attention in her writings. Alexander also associates people and places, the past and the present, and ponders over their significance. Every border crossing provoked her imagination and forced her to fabricate, to weave tales, to chisel out a personal space and her works always attempt to locate and relocate the migrant space which is colored by hybridity both in form and content. Alexander’s poems with their intense lyricism convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom house is both everywhere and nowhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether walking on a city street or reading Basho in the Himalayas, holds echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. She has written poems of love, war and the rippling effects of violence, and dislocation of love and its aftermath. Alexander’s poetry is uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world and serves as an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and is capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard. Her poetry initiates movement towards a new perception of women and a romantic reconnection with the feminine unconscious as an agency of restoration. Generally, Alexander distils her poetry out of the present, but the present is constantly inflected by multiple dislocations. Uma Parameswaran has rightly commented upon the interconnectedness of the past and the present in immigrant imagination, and the intermingling of imagery drawn from one’s immediate, actual landscape. Alexander draws imagery from varied migrated cultural landscapes: childhood in Tiruvella, Allahabadand Pune, and adolescence in Khartoum and adulthood in Nottingham, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Manhattan. Multiple migrations in Alexander’s life have also resulted in a poetic vocabulary that is a palimpsest of various languages. In her childhood it was a burden for her to learn English, colonial language, but in later years she has fused it with the rhythms of her mother tongue Malayalam. As Rebecca Sultana in observes that Alexander’s periodic return to the Indian landscape as a backdrop is hard to dismiss and is an indication of the significance of India in her varied cultural recollections. Actually, the cultural bases of her poems are unmistakably Indian but when she tries to define her Indian identity, she is mistaken to be Native American. Alexander’s poems inevitably deal with dislocation and are deep-rooted in India and her childhood travels. Alexander considers the collection of poems, House of a Thousand Doors (1988) as a kind of genetic benchmark in her writing. Alexander in this collection of poems has drawn on the influence of family in order to create an artistic vision. She has drawn grandmother figure from her memory and dream, and she is made to empower Alexander to speak in an alien landscape. Alexander reflects her interlocked relationship with her origins, to be more specific, about her ancestral home in Tiruvellaand her grandmother in House of a thousand doors: This house has a thousand doors The sills are cut in bronze at twilight as the sun burns down to the Kerala coast. The roof is tiled in red, in dreams waves lilt, a silken fan in grandmother’s hands shell colored, utterly bare as the light takes her. She kneels at each of the thousand doors in turn paying her dues. Her debt is endless. Alexander tries to reorient her true self by 16 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

welding her forgotten native roots against an agitating history of displacement in a highly active transnational world. In River and Bridge poem Alexander raises thematic and ideological issues about the return to Indian roots in pure forms, the marginal self who interweaves through both Indian and foreign locations, and the crucial issue of assimilation into American culture. Problems of the containment of the Indian imagination in an alien landscape are sounded out in the poem Relocation‖: Scraping it all back: A species of composition routine as crossing streets or taking out the garbage nothing to blow the mind The mind held in a metallic fork its sense inviolate, the questions of travel scored by icy borders, the imagination ordering itself. The Storm is a poem of five parts, in which Alexander’s poetic voice seeks accountability to a history of migration and dislocation as it affects so many ordinary people, whose anonymous stories are evoked in ―The Travelers: Migrant workers stripped of mop and dirty bucker, young mothers who scrub kitchen floors in high windowed houses with immaculate carpets, Tired chowkidars seeking their Pennies out in a cold country, students, ageing scholars, doctors wedded to insurance slips, lawyers shoveling guilt behind their satin wallpaper. Alexander in her poem Night Scene-The Garden (1992) considers the construction and the reconstruction of the self as an ongoing process and the violent pain of the barbed wire is vividly picturized. Alexander’s invocation to the muse is expressed in highly charged words in No Man’s Land: My back against barbed wire I stand at the garden’s edge in the middle of the night. That out of the dumb and bleeding part of me I may claim my heritage. Alexander’s diasporic consciousness longs to harmonize the past and the present and move towards progress. According to Alexander poetry acts as the source of reconciliation that synchronizes the past and present and encourages us to proceed in order to bring forth a positive change. Thus, Alexander in ―River and Bridge‖ observe that the idea of birth is accepted and a new identity is won with difficulty in the case of rebirth. 1.6 STYLISTIC AND THEMATIC PRESENTATION IN MEENA ALEXANDER’S WORKS In the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of her memoir Fault Lines Kenyan author NgugiwasThiong'o writes among the numerous global allusions that litter the pages of Fault Lines is Walt Whitman. This is a fitting introduction to Meena Alexander's poetry, as her work features continuing references to a conflicting multiplicity, sometimes cast as invigorating but sometimes also overwhelming. Indian women poets have often been considered within the tradition of “confessional poetry”, a mode that has been attributed for example to Kamala Das, one of the most important and influential twentieth-century women poets in the Indian subcontinent, and one who incidentally came from Kerala like Alexander. Meena Alexander has certainly been influenced by Kamala Das, and especially by her determination not to avoid the self- 17 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

disclosures needed to write autobiographical material. It can be argued that the confessional mode is almost inevitable when one writes within the field of feminism or, in a different way, postcolonialism, where personal experience plays such an important role. This is likely to be enhanced when the awareness of the wounds of patriarchal society and of a postcolonial-yet- not-post racial world intersect. Meena Alexander works with is extremely personal, but it also reaches out to a wider audience, not only made up of South Asian women or people from countries that have been formerly colonized, but of people interested in the value of art in a world fraught with violence, or interested in any form of marginality and dislocation. Another feature that needs to be stressed is that in her poetry and essays there are more questions than answers. Physical objects and places, rather than abstract images, are often at the core of Alexander's poems: the house in Tiruvella with its well and the barbed-wire around it, the island of Manhattan with its apartment blocks and the Hudson River, the stone- eating girl, and so on. This is not by chance: Alexander's poetry needs physicality in order to make sense of a self that is perceived as fragmentary and inconsistent. In order to make up memory, in other words, one needs something to anchor it to. In Alexander's poetry a lyrical tone is balanced with instances where it is perfectly possible to discuss more worldly matters. As noted by Wendy Anne Kopisch, there are instances where she is able to juxtapose “unlyrical phenomena”– she makes the example of instant messaging in “Green Parasol”– with highly charged images, where “that act of crystallizing the emotion through the image actually has its own peculiar grace”. Even with the insertion of these more pragmatical elements, Kopisch affirms, the musicality of the poetry is maintained. From time-to-time Alexander's poems are linked one another. The device used is the recovery of images and metaphors from other poems, a feature that allows the poet to scrutinize them once again and work on them from a slightly different and innovative perspective. It happens thus that certain semantic fields or images recur in her poems: stitching and seaming, fault lines and fissures, the barbed wire which she sees as a symbol for wars and divisions, a bit of raw silk from her grandmother's sari, or the well in the backyard of her ancestral house are all elements that appear in several poems and have always new and rich associations. Sometimes she even rephrases and reworks on a poem. In “Gandhi's Bicycle (My Muse Comes to Me)”, for instance, she reworks on a poem published in the same collection, “Ancestors”, where she envisioned her grandparents bicycling around Ground Zero. In the newer poem she juxtaposes that image with one of Gandhi and his bicycle, implicitly putting the violence in North America next to the carnage in Gujarat. The recurring image of fragments, fissures and fault lines is something that she shares with other postcolonial authors. In his Nobel lecture, Derek Walcott speaks of a fragmented vase whose junctures are visible, in order to explain how he envisions Caribbean identity, made of 18 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

different pieces from a broken vase joined together so that the glue will show. He speaks of identity as “this cracked heirloom whose restoration shows its white scars” and compares it with the process of poetic composition. Salman Rushdie resorts to a similar image when he makes the protagonist of his novel Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai, assert that he feels he is “cracking all over like an old jug”. Korean-American poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's broken syntax in Dictée (1982) and film-maker Trinh T. Minh-ha's subtitling and naming strategies in her documentary Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989) are only two more examples of how diasporic and exilic artists have used continuous references to fragmentation in order to express their own existential situation. In order to better explain why postcolonial writers, feel the need to show the seams of their labour, in a published interview Meena Alexander recurs to the example of the gap between the sex worker and the academic, both hailing from India and both living in the same city in the Western world. For postcolonial or displaced authors, she believes, the seams need to show very well, in order to make sense of one's fragmented positionalities as a writer. In other words, Alexander builds what Salman Rushdie calls “imaginary homelands” (1991), places that no longer exist, if not in one's own memory. At the beginning of her book on poetry and dislocation, Meena Alexander reports how she was once asked what shape her house would be if it were made with paper. Meena Alexander believes in poetry as political activism: her poetry often deals with conflicts and unrest, cities at the edge of war, episodes of discrimination, and so on. In an interview with Ruth Maxey, the poet admits that history conspires against the writing of poetry. Many American poets have tried to do away with history, and to break the chains that still linked them to tradition, and to the old canon of British poetry. Alexander mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose notion of self-reliance, which she interprets as reinvention of the self, “exhilarated” her. In a poem from the sequence “Letters to Gandhi”, while wandering through Bengali Market in New Delhi, the narrator hears the voice of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and how in “Instead of a Preface” from her ten-poem cycle Requiem she reports that she was asked if as a poet she could describe things like injustice, prejudice, fear and desolation. Akhmatova answered that indeed she could, and as a proof she has the rest of the poems in the sequence, which deal with Stalinist terror. With regards to violence, Alexander intends to say, it is perhaps difficult to write poetry, but it is indeed possible. It is the duty of the poet, according to her, even a necessity, to find a way to bear witness to what cannot be conveyed in any other way. In Poetics of Dislocation, while discussing the poetry of Natasha Trethewey and her struggles with race, Alexander writes: “history is a wound, almost unbearable, and beauty becomes the bright reversion, what permits us to bear witness, to endure, to turn again as we must to the necessary earth”. Like Audre Lorde, whose remarks about poetry not being a luxury for women are famous, Alexander says that according to her poetry “is the music of survival” (ibid., 116), what Carolyn Forché (1981) – and later Czeslaw Milosz (1983) – called “a poetry of witness”48. The “bright reversion” of beauty 19 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

necessary to counteract the brutal facts of history is, according to Alexander, the key to write poetry of witness. In the essay “Fragile Places”, where she remembers how she came to write about the relief camps she visited in Gujarat, she writes: “the poem can take a tiny jot of the horror but evoke grief, restore tenderness so that we are not thrust back into an abject silence. As if we have heard and seen nothing”. As she puts it somewhere else, poetry is “a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist”, a way to reconcile us to the horrors of our world and to the violence of history. Writing about New York City has changed in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, Meena Alexander seems to explain in this poem, and when writing about things like the landscape, one needs to be aware of the horrors that the city has seen. Meena Alexander's essays are often defined as lyrical, based on personal experiences and impressions, rather than on theory or analysis. Alexander relates her use of highly charged prose with the Indian tradition of kavya, a Sanskrit literary style used by court poets from the seventh century onwards. Furthermore, her essays seem to work their way around a topic, rather than in a cause-effect movement51. In writing these short essays she often starts from something very personal, and then broadens the topic in order to bring out a more complex set of problems. According to Rustomji, this is reminiscent of a mandala, which in regard to Meena Alexander's poetry she defines as “an intense self- reflection” at the core, and “an extraordinary expansion of concern for other people” departing from that centre. In an interview with Lavina Shankar she confirms that “the only way I could write something about things in the world is by going inward”. Discussing the sometimes-blurred distinction between personal and public poems, she also affirms that “there have to be those two elements, like waves”. Interestingly, her essays are often followed by one or two poems that illustrate the topic discussed, as if she were approaching the subject from two different angles. Her main concern is the exceedingly complicated relationship between place and memory: how is memory possible for a dislocated person, with a fragmented and unstable consciousness of time and space? How can memory be recollected and reassembled in these conditions? Sometimes the structure of her poems – the succession of the couplets or triplets, the carefully-constructed stanzas and the distinct compression of the sonnet she sometimes uses – gives stability to Alexander's fragmentary self and to her multifarious literary influences. This is particularly true for her more recent poetry, with Quickly Changing River being the perfect example of that. Criticism on Meena Alexander focuses mostly on her memoir, on her many essays and on her two novels, in spites of the fact that she is primarily a poet. In Passage to Manhattan, the first monographic study on Alexander, there are three essays, out of a total of fifteen, dedicated to her poetry, and only a few passing references to her poems in the other ones, which focus on everything Alexander has written, from her early studies on phenomenology and Romanticism to her reflections on the postcolonial experience in The Shock of Arrival. In 20 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

spite of this, there are many published interviews with the author, and the fact that she is a writer who already reflects a lot on her own writing has helped shaping my analysis, which tends to readjust the balance towards her poetry. 1.7 SUMMARY  The work of Meena Alexander certainly draws attention to the pulling and pushing in one or the other direction of the \"allegiance axes\" of gender, race and sexuality.  Alexander is nevertheless living proof that there need not be any anxiety in resolving the conflicts originating from such complex subject positions, and that to give prominence to one or the other aspect of one's fragmented identity is not an ideal way to tackle the problem.  An acceptance of ambiguity and ambivalence is instead the way these writers have found to challenge assumptions about topics such as writing, identity, or location.  One thing that could be evinced from the study is that the poet draws strength from tumult, as well as from painful wounds and conflicts.  Poems and prose pieces often deal with wars, troubled borders, or gory stories, either set in the real world or in a fantasy land.  To find in poetry a way to work with rough and painful material, and from that to form something aesthetically convincing seems to be a cardinal point in their poetics.  The concept is very far from Wordsworth's idea that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”.  There is all but tranquility in the recollection of previously unexpressed thoughts in the work of these postcolonial women poets.  As Jahan Ramazani writes in the coda of his book on postcolonial poetry, the most important achievement of postcolonial poets “lies less in announcing their hybrid experience than in forging aesthetic forms that embody it”.  As he observed, “poetry – a genre rich in paradox and multivalent symbols, irony and metaphor – is well-suited to mediating and registering the contradictions of split cultural experience.”  The “split cultural experience” of postcolonial women poets is manifold, not only from a geographical but also from a gender-related point of view, thus postcolonial women poets are particularly interesting to analyze for their intrinsic cultural ambiguities. 21 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Poetrywith its “swift territorial shifts”, offers the possibility to write about the intersectionality of postcolonialism and feminism in rich and innovative ways.  The plurality of the poetic text, with its aporias and flexibility of meaning, is in other words a real asset for the postcolonial woman writer.  Alexander offers her own contributions to what theorists of feminism and postcolonialism – or of any junction of both – have written, even modifying the theoretical starting points with personal elaborations on the different aspects of their composite identity.  It can be argued that the intersections between postcolonialism and feminism seem to form a tangle of conflicting thoughts with no shape, something that even scholars can hardly give a name to.  A strategy that diasporic women writers seem to cherish and which they use to cope with the intricacies of their shifting positionalities is that of finding alliances in other writers who also cross barriers, of nationality, gender, sexuality, religious affiliation, and so on.  Alexander even writes that she needs to “flow into the sea of migrant memory”.  What Meena Alexander calls “poetics of dislocation” can also be applied to writers that are not dislocated in the strict sense of the word, and it is for this reason that she can find space for Virginia Woolf among A.K. Ramanujan and Agha Shahid Ali in her book on dislocated writers.  As a matter of fact, a situation of marginality akin to that of displaced writers can be found in women writers, or in lesbian writers for Namjoshi. Meena Alexander, SunitiNamjoshi and ImtiazDharker all offer what could be termed “precarious affiliations”, something that is close to Gayatri Spivak's concept of “strategic essentialism” but perhaps even modifies it, through the characteristic ambivalence poet’s use in their art.  Alliances in this case are precarious in the sense that they are continuously made and broken. For Indian women a writer, drawing on Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich or William Wordsworth is equally important and problematic. Referencing Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Kamala Das, both poets from the Indian subcontinent, is equally fraught with anxieties.  These “lateral holdings”, as Meena Alexander calls them, are not simply geography of influences that the authors can cling to, but rather a real strategy for survival.  Spivak's strategic essentialism seems to be practiced by the poets I analyzed in a more radical way than that expressed in theoretical remarks on the gendered subaltern 22 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

subject: here the markers crossed are not only within the axis of gender, but across various and constantly-shifting axes, thus Meena Alexander can draw on Walt Whitman, SunitiNamjoshi on Adrienne Rich, and ImtiazDharker on Faiz, forming temporary and strategic alliances that prevaricate boundaries of gender, class, race, ethnicity and so on.  The study of postcolonial women writers is certainly important in order to make clear that when discussing issues connected to feminism it is important to include reflections on the perception of race and gender, and that gender-related topics need to be addressed for a more nuanced and complex assessment of post coloniality and of its impact on the contemporary world.  Women writers of colour, or dislocated women writers for that matter, should not be considered only as a way to put white feminists and post colonialists in communication, but they need to be studied and valued for the sake of their art.  The “back against the wall aesthetic”, as Meena Alexander beautifully calls it, where the dark-skinned woman writer needs to steal but at the same time subvert a given aesthetic, is a confirmation of the continuous and sometimes overwhelming effort to negotiate between positionalities, a strategy that the postcolonial woman writer has had to learn in order to deal with the restrictions imposed by a world dominated by male normative, Eurocentric and heteronormative writers.  Interlocked discriminations and hierarchical structures are everyday bread for these writers, who attempt to challenge fixity of meaning through a poetical language that is naturally rich in multivalent images and paradoxes.  Alexander finds inspiration in the city landscape, in its continuous change and in the interstices between buildings.  The metropolis – with its constant and frantic movement – reflects their own existential situation of perennial evolution and self-refashioning.  Canadian landscape to the forest of words which she feels she is constantly extricating herself from, as an Indian woman writing in English and a lesbian writer in a world dominated by heteronormative writing.  The works of these dislocated women poets who chose to write in the language of the colonizer, English is appropriated, made suitable to describe their own dislocated world.  It is often the only language in which they can write, because it is that of their formal education. 23 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 It can be argued that the English language takes the charged power of previously unexpressed thoughts about the conflicts in their lives.  These writers challenge normativity in writing because they are dark-skinned women writing in the tongue of the colonizer.  Using the English language is for them yet another possibility of subverting conventions, and a way of drawing strength from an internal conflict.  The back against the wall aesthetic which dislocated women writers are forced to use therefore becomes strength rather than a constraint, and it is this evolution that is the best achievement of the dislocated women writers.  Alexander draws inspiration from mystical poetry- Alexander writes about Mirabai.  Refusals of organized religion and of the established order of things, together with the embracing of a different form of spirituality, are characteristic of the mystical poetry of the Indian subcontinent.  Mystical poetry is also connected with the opening of social barriers, and with a passionate poetic performance.  One last reflection on the attention devoted to location in this work needs to be done here. First of all, one could argue that the plurality of the religious confessions of the Indian subcontinent, each of them with its groups and schools of thought, along with its many languages, the intricacy of diverse past influences, not to mention its widespread inequalities and social contrasts, have somehow facilitated, rather than complicated, the work of these writers.  Indian women writers one always needs to remember that traditionally Indian women are the bearers of values that are hardly compatible with the life of a writer.  One's personal matters, to speak about one's sexuality and one's femininity are still a taboo for many Indian women  Meena Alexander's works were not published in India for many years.  In India, perhaps more than in other Third-World countries, women are forced to be the bearers of traditional values that end up conflating with those of nationalism and anti-colonialism, in order to highlight the moral difference with the former colonizers and with the Western world.  Scholars concur that it is desirable for Third-World countries to achieve modernization and innovation through a path which is different from that leading to neo-colonization and hyper-globalization. 24 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Nandy writes in his study on the recovery of self after the scars of colonialism, the gender and the hybrid carry what he considers to be a transformative potential.  The counter-hegemonic views are of great value for the formation of new layered and multivalent identities. 1.8KEYWORDS  Diaspora - Migration  Khartoum -is the capital of Sudan  Romantic literature -Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.  Lyric Poetry- Lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person.  Migration -to move from one country, place, or locality to another  Subjectivity -the quality of being based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.  Contemporary- belonging to the same time as somebody/something else.  Memoir -a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.  Postcolonial- the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism  Baritone -a male singing voice that is fairly low; a man with this voice  Syntax- the system of rules for the structure of a sentence in a language. 1.9 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Diasporic Distresses and Female Expression in the poems of Meena Alexander and Sujata Bhatt – Analyze ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. Analyze the Diasporic Sensibility in Meena Alexander’s works. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Critically think how women are portrayed in Meena Alexander’s works. 25 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 1.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. What is diasporic poem? 2. What type of writer Meena Alexander is? 3. What message does Meena Alexander convey through her works? 4. What is Meena Alexander's particular interest as a writer? 5. Where is the poet Meena Alexander settled? Long Questions 1. Write the biography of Meena Alexander and about her famous works 2. Discuss Meena Alexander is an Indian poet 3. Explain the plot and style of Meena Alexander 4. Discuss Meena Alexander's poetic style and major themes. 5. Explain the characteristics of Postcolonial writers B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. At what age Meena Alexander changed her name? a. 15 b.16 c. 17 d. 14 2. Meena Alexander’s original name was ______ a. Mary Elizabeth Alexander b. Alexander c. Elizabeth d. Susan Alexander 26 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3. Meena Alexander died at the age of _______ a. 67 b. 57 c. 63 d. 64 4. Meena Alexander’s husband _______ a. David Lelyveld b. Alexander c. David d. Davidson 5. Representing Meena Alexander own multilingual nature, “Meena” means in _____ in Sanskrit. a. Fish b. Jewel c. Port d. Beauty Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-a 1.11 REFERENCES References book  Alexander, Meena. Birthplace with Buried Stones. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2013.  Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines: A Memoir. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Feminist Press, 2003. 27 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Alexander, Meena. Illiterate Heart. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2002.  Alexander, Meena. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press, 1996.  Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1993. Textbook references  Alexander, Meena. The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979 Websites  http://ijrpublisher.com/gallery/26-sp-january-2019.pdf  https://scroll.in/article/903171/meena-alexander-1951-2018-the-poet-from-india-who- lived-and-wrote-with-sensitivity-for-the-world  http://ijllnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_3_September_2018/23.pdf  https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/09/alexander-meena/ 28 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT - 2MEENA ALEXANDER: BIRTHPLACE WITH BURIED STONES FROM RAW MEDITATIONS ON MONEY SHE SPEAKS: A SCHOOL TEACHER FROM SOUTH INDIA STRUCTURE 2.0 Learning Objectives 2.1 Birthplace with Buried Stones – Text 2.2 Birthplace with Buried Stones – Analysis 2.3 From Raw Meditations on Money, 1. She Speaks: A School Teacher from South India 2.4 Analysis - She Speaks: A School Teacher From Southern India 2.5 The Social Space Of Indian Women 2.6 Summary 2.7 Keywords 2.8 Learning Activity 2.9 Unit End Questions 2.10References 2.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Analyse the poems of Meena Alexander  Identify background knowledge about the work  List the Literary Devices in the poem 2.1 BIRTHPLACE WITH BURIED STONES - TEXT I In the absence of reliable ghosts, I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: 29 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Torn sails from the Ganga River, 30 Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make-believe, A lyric summoning. II I came into this world in an Allahabad hospital, Close to a smelly cow pasture. I was brought to a barracks, with white walls And corrugated tin roof, Beside a civil aviation training center. In World War II officers were docketed there. I heard the twang of propellers, Jets pumping hot whorls of air, Heaven bent, Blessing my first home. III In an open doorway, in half darkness I see a young woman standing. Her breasts are swollen with milk. She is transfixed, staring at a man, His hair gleaming with sweat, Trousers rolled up Stepping off his bicycle, Mustard bloom catches in his shirt. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

I do not know what she says to him, 31 Or he to her, all that is utterly beyond me. Their infant once a clot of blood Is spectral still. Behind this family are vessels of brass Dotted with saffron, The trunk of a mango tree chopped into bits, Ready to be burnt at the household fire. IV Through the portals of that larger chaos, What we can scarcely conceive of in our minds— We'd rather think of starry nights with biting flames Trapped inside tree trunks, a wellspring of desire Igniting men and gods, A lava storm where butterflies dance— Comes bloodletting at the borders, Severed tongues, riots in the capital, The unspeakable hurt of history: So the river Ganga pours into the sea. V In aftermath—the elements of vocal awakening: Crud, spittle, snot, menstrual blistering, Also infant steps, a child's hunger, a woman's rage At the entrance to a kitchen, Her hands picking up vegetable shavings, chicken bones, Gold tossed from an ancestral keep. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

All this flows into me as mottled memory, Mixed with syllables of sweat, gashed syntax, Strands of burst bone in river sand, Beside the buried stones of Sarasvati Koop— Well of mystic sky-water where swans Dip their throats and come out dreaming. 2.2 BIRTHPLACE WITH BURIED STONES - ANALYSIS Alexander’s multi-migrations make her fall in search of her identity and entity. Her poetry is a mingling of native and foreign cultures and experiences. Her works are related to home and her identity. And it is replete with past and present struggling experiences. On the one hand, she has to leave her home and native identity and on the other hand, she continues endeavoring to make a home and an identity through her poetic outburst. Her poetry reveals the theme of rootlessness and dislocation. Her recurrent migrations make her determined to make a survival place in the literary world with a postcolonial journey of life full of anguish and nostalgic memory. Her journey is a fragmented journey of life and queries of life and hope: “I start to write fragments / as much to myself to another / Who lives in my mind? / Can the mind hold its hope?”. Her journey of life begins from her native land India and settles to a foreign land America. Her productive literary creations symbolize a journey from childhood to maturity with a literary career. And she had to face multi- migrations and many-facet experiences. Her creations dip into those experiences. So, her works may be compared to the genre, Bildungsroman’ and she is a Migratory Bildungsroman. Birthplace is the motherland and the primary identity of an individual. The home and parents are the actual identity of a child and a grown-up man. The child, when grows up as a mature one with ups and downs in life, he or she tries to remember and ruminate his or her childhood experiences and the experiences of the journey of life. The individual can never live without the memory of home and homely affections as well as hard and bitter realities regarding homely identity. It is the zigzag journey of life full of cares, duties, pains, agonies, complexities and the betweenness of life. Meena Alexander always faces and feels dislocated. Her writings are replete with cultural instability, minority, gender, race, dislocation and rootlessness, and struggle to find or make a home. 32 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Nostalgic Meena Alexander’s poetry sparkles with the loss of love and childhood. She begins her journey of life with her birth and peaceful childhood and a simple life. But gradually she faces complexities and simplicities in life. Happiness is the one facet of the coin of life. The opposite one is the sorrow. The matured age with the burden of bitter experience recalls the happy childhood and wishes to have those days of thoughtless rapture. It is her journey of self-expression and self-discovery. She discloses the wishing desire of each and every one: “Happiness is an aspect of life.” The home is a living identity for the owner of a house or building. Man is born to live and die. After one’s birth one has one day to die and to leave the living place. Throughout his living tenure man continuously tries to make his identity in and out of his home. The journey of making identity continues. The soul is such a spirit that makes an abode in the form of a body. The body becomes the living place of the soul. But the body can’t be an everlasting living place of the soul. The home or the body is a changeable object to the soul. As the body once becomes inactive or cold blood, the soul leaves it. The soul cannot live in „her mutilated parts of the body. The term Diaspora may be connected to this analogy. The diasporic writers leave their own homeland and settle in a foreign state or country. The home is to Meena Alexander a home of confinement with traditional boundary and traditional cultural practices and beliefs. Meena Alexander violates the traditional system and appears to be a distinguished diasporic writer. His journey with postcolonial objectivity and subjectivity is imbued with the journey from known to the unknown and seen to the unseen. If one finds a place or a homely place in an unknown region or country, he or she tries to make a memorable place and an another home one. One’s own home may not be a permanent home and identity for his or her state. Alexander, thus, stresses: “Shall a soul visit her mutilated parts? / How much shall a body be home? It is natural for a bird to twitter or sing though some try to hinder its spontaneous flow of music. The musical song bears a message for human beings. Sometimes man also symbolically becomes a bird to scatter his message for his identity and for the welfare of the mankind. Even there are some persons who always try to draw back others’ leading attitude and humane activities. What the motto of others maybe it is the bird’s challenge to move forward with its natural instinct. It is indirectly and symbolically referred to the patriarchal dominance prevailing in most of the families of the human society. Alexander presents the patriarchy with an indirect and symbolic point of view through her poetic strength: “We’ve even struck the bird’s throat.” The poems of the collection of poetry Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013) are deeply rooted in memory and mystery with personal history. The terms in the title Buried Stones somehow hint at the unforgettable and unavoidable hard realities of the life of Meena Alexander, which she cannot break like a stone but they shake her while she tries to produce her literary productions. And they make a place in her poetic creations. War and love have also made a place in her poetic creations. The poems also symbolize her journey of life from a common 33 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

home India to an unknown home America and an uncommon literary home with an extraordinary creative power, where the cultures and pictures of her native land India make a home, a global home and an identity, an international one for none but herself. On the collection Billy Collins comments: “With one hand on the things and textures of the material world and the other reaching into the mysteries beyond us, Meena Alexander does what poetry does best, conveying us from the known to the unknown with grace and formal care.” Alexander knows that life is a zigzag journey with pains and pitching forward. But dream and destination cannot remain unfulfilled. So she hails hope and holds the rope of success in life. The poem Birthplace with Buried Stones is deeply rooted in the memory of Alexander. Her homely memory and incidents make a home for her in her literary creations. She cannot live without thinking of her birthplace Allahabad and India. Her memory relating to her home is vibrant even though she lives abroad. All the pictures reflected in her mind come to her poetic pictures of words: “All this flows into me as mottled memory.” Alexander is also shocked at the bloody incidents and riots. But she remains positive with the existential belief of God, blessing’ her and her family. And she has been able to mix herself up with a huge area of culture. She is silent and vibrant: “The unspeakable hurt of history: / So the river Ganga pours into the sea. / Heaven bent, / Blessing my first home.” Life begins with a welcome of birth just as the day begins with morning. The morning is a very beautiful and joyous part of a day. So the morning shows the day how it will go on throughout. One’s birth hints at the journey of life, a difficult one. Man is born free and brings joy to the near and dear ones. But his journey of life is full of cares, difficulties, predicaments, joys and it is a life of unstable accounts of living. The struggling person identified with Meena Alexander, starts the day with diligence of study in order to make a home and an identity staying at a home of culture and nature: “I sit in a patch of shade cast by a pipal tree. / Each morning I read a few lines from The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” Everything lies around everybody. But it is the life that matters much. In a state of rootlessness and dislocation Meena Alexander finds trouble in life. Just at her early age she and her mother had to set for Sudan where she had her early education. But being an Indian she had much attachment to India and her birthplace and even her native culture. She is actually in a dilemma of diaspora. Yet she tries to come out of a culture of traditional belief of some Indians. Even her mother was against her motto of her life. In an interview Alexander without hesitation expresses: “My mother didn’t approve of me writing at all. She just thought this was the weirdest thing to be doing with your life. Mothers don’t want their daughters to write because this is against a model of womanhood of some sort, right? My mother thought I should be a good needlewoman, learn how to make good sambar [lentils with vegetables], and take care of my husband. I should have a certain amount of education but not too much.” 34 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Regarding her mother’s view of life, sometimes life seems to her to be both pessimistic and optimistic though in the long run optimism overshadows pessimism. She has a horizontal hope for achievement even with a difficult way. She as if considers herself as a learner- child who often without knowing grips something inedible and tries to have that into its mouth. Her inward picture comes out through her mighty words in the form of an ornament of language: “Everything is broken and numinous / Tiled roofs outcrops of stone, flesh, torn from molluks. /Far away, a flotilla of boats. A child sucking stones. / There is a forked path to this moment.” Strangeness makes one strange. The strange thinking leads a writer to an unknown place and state or home or success. Alexander had and has such a strange imaginative power that made her famous and distinguished. Such imaginations are like that there are no trees but there are green leaves; there is no human being but the imaginative or real powerful soul that is free to think. Nature feeds Meena Alexander’s seventh collection of poetry and suffuses its central roots. Dhanladhar peaks, pipal tree, green parrot wings, cockatoo, munshi, grasshopper, Kurinji flowers, cows, camels carry us to an intense universe that is othertoo much modern English poetry. Yet, because India is part of Alexander’s childhood and continuous returns as an adult, she can revisit and explore nature in memory as well as fact, as Wordsworth did. Stone, dust, fire are not ornament, travel detail, or invoked for symbolic comparisons. They course through Alexander’s life, giving her the authority to return them to poetry as origins and sources. Almost by accident we register the contrast when bottled water, a squirrel down the chimney, blue spruce, a black walnut appears as details in her poems. Words are different in feeling, sound, color and history for her when situated in North America. For most writers, what the mind selects is deeply affected by place. Imagine ‘dust’ in relation to New York City, or ‘fire.’ It would be difficult to see them as redolent constants, omnipresent in memory. Alexander, who has always written in English, brings, in this volume, a haunting pitch to what English poetry can offer as its own. Ungovernable and healing nature finds defining space in a postmodern landscape. Migrations, wars, loves form her broad, overarching question: “what are we to make of experimental geographies?” Underlying her phrase, ‘experimental geographies’, are physical dislocations, new societal and personal maps. Some are voluntary, many convulsive and forced. Articulating her daunting and incomplete conclusions, ancient and modern lexicons mix as the poet transverses past and present. “Syllables tumble/ in a milky river// Babbling mother/ font of memory.” Everpresent is a general sublimnal instability that may transform into light or darkness. Possible moods of menace ripple nearly as often as Alexander’s uses of silk and tulle. “A square of pigeons and parrots on loose stones, / Hammer-toed quail and horsemen/ desperate for conquest”. Loose, hammer-toed, desperate catch, in what seem to be nearly inevitable adjectives, the potential for destabilization from one line to the next. 35 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Sharp contrasts abide in Alexander’s life from India to New York City; yet the physical world that she knows from India provides signposts for universal questions that memory raises and history insists upon. She is a witness to fixed societal clashes and ones involving relations between women and men. As part of her female lexicon, Alexander uses “chifon saris,” “hunks of burlap,\" “mild cotton,” “mud on the hem” -- all references to Indian women’s clothing, as well as standing for the politics of Indian independence, signs of class, evidence of young girls’ flights into passion -- but these details go further. They carry wide- sweeping empathy and vision, as well as the suffering and violence locked in defined roles. She laments for the “seven-week creature/ Paddling inside, scraped out.” Her language can burst into vivid, unrelenting images of women being coerced and forced: St. Lucy, “her throat a column of tears”/ “still clothed in savage reeds.” Yet the strength of her work is its rejection of intellectual positions. Her images carry graceful movements that envelop the reader as experiences with their unknowable consequences. The stanza creates a subtle tone of wistful mourning: the contrast between “glistening skin” and the impact of “utterly bare” inches in and then the image settles in different light. The intimate hope and sound connections in the words “loosen” and “glisten” and the expanse that continues in “utterly” complicates, suddenly, as if by the act of baring her skin, the act of undressing, the woman is exposed in a moment without interpretation. It should be an intimate moment of pleasure. But space in line one. rim in line two and no one remembers in line three, turn the glistening into something nearly tragic. There is beauty, and yet her solitary act lends weight to bare as depletion, as well as exposed. And that no one remembers is a fact, even if it may be invented. There is need, longing, waste; those moments are lost unless they are imagined. One of the pleasures of her poems is how meaning flows through, from and among lines and stanzas. Her pacing follows the colorings of feeling and when the tone grows too poetic, she knows how to lighten it with impish humor. “I came into this world in an Allahabad hospital, /Close to a smelly cow pasture.” Several of Alexander’s poems have been set to music including “Impossible Grace,” included in her collection. While it is not possible in this brief space to even skim the passages that work as musical structures, here are several progressions from a poem in the Jerusalem cycle, “Garden in Nazareth.” The scene is a visit to the Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali before he died. It is illustrative of the volatility that Alexander has made her own. The sand in the wings, the desert not far would be redundant if it were not for the garden and the burning bus. Together with the repetition of garden, played off against the desert and its conflicts, harsh realities that even mark birds, we have a complete summation of history, a situation and mood. The venerable man that she is visiting is in bed, dying. He is moved by her coming. He wipes a tear; she adjusts his blanket. 36 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The sound and repetition of the imagesthe thread of gold that breaks the sky, an unseen life of sound and circling sense-grounded by the rhythm of ritual action, boil milk, pour into metal, hand it to the man, create a mood of benediction. The birds that are coming to the garden, the repetition of their appearances, the light in Ali’s faceis it from the sun, or from inside? The mood, exquisitely paced, is defined by movements in and out, stretching, reaching, circling, a life not seen, but of sound, vivid air, and the wound of mist balanced and defined by the real world. The phrase “perpetual benediction” is the fulcrum balancing both worlds. It holds up Ali’s art, his perception of the invisible, and the blessing of living. The book’s three parts take us from India and New York to Jerusalem, to a final group of deeply felt poems about the demands of love. While the poet frequently surprises with flashes of mechanized, modern life, subways or “jets pumping hot whorls of air,” her matrix is one defined by natural laws that by instinct and ‘reason’ bind humans to ethical order. In the last section in a poem called, “Lost Garden” she arrives at a nearly Shakespearean conclusion that “there is nothing to see but nakedness.” Inside the observation there is acceptance, dry as the desert, full of birds with sand on their wings. Alexander’s whole book can be seen in this courageous, brave light. She touches on the mysteries of nakedness with humility. In a beautiful poem called “Cantata for a Riderless Horse, she says: “Raised on betrayal /I could not bear to be happy/ “Survival of the fittest parts of the self/ I thought was what was called for.” Meena Alexander’s language for experience “storm-red,” “coveted” “willing to bomb,” “smeared with ash” the “voile,” “pink tulle” and the everpresent “spittle” tells truths about family, nation, justice, passion and memory once they have been torn, mixed and changed. Her ability to express the “larger chaos” brings us directly into our complicated world, where she finds nature’s presence basic to understanding human order. She leads us to feel “what we can scarcely conceive with our minds.” 2.3 FROM RAW MEDITATIONS ON MONEY, 1. SHE SPEAKS: A SCHOOL TEACHER FROM SOUTH INDIA Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into mud and they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (We know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). 37 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

They hung themselves from fans. 38 In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, would not be forced to work his fists to bone. So that is how a portion of the story goes. Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. How old were they? Of marriageable age certainly. Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, something of that sort. How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters, most certainly I do not want father to proffer money he does not have for my marriage. Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensils, silks, and tiny glittering bits of gold to hang about my ears and throat. Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history and geography, Kerala University, first class first. The storm tree puts out its limbs and I see three girls swinging. One of them is me. Step back I tell myself. Saumiya, step back. The whole history CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of womankind is compacted here. Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight, breathe into the strokes of catastrophe, and let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces. See how the monsoon winds soar and shunt tropic air into a house of souls, a doorway stopped by clouds. Set your feet into broken stones and this red earth and pouring rain. For us there is no exile. 2.4 ANALYSIS - SHE SPEAKS: A SCHOOL TEACHER FROM SOUTHERN INDIA Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into, mud & they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (we know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). They hung themselves from fans. In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, would not be forced to work his fists to bone. So that is how a portion of the story goes. Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. How old were they? Of marriageable age certainly. Sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, something of that sort. How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters.Most certainly I do not want father to proffer money he does not have for my marriage. Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensilssilks, and tiny glittering bits of gold to hang about my ears and throat. Gold is labor time accumulated ... labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history & geography Kerala University, first class first. 39 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The storm tree puts our it’s limbs & I see three girls swinging. One of them is me. Step back I tell myself. Saumiya step back. The whole history of womankind is compacted here. Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight,breathe into the strokes of catastrophe & let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough & the small hot faces. See how the monsoon winds soar & shunt tropic air, into a house of souls a doorway stopped by clouds. Set your feet into broken stones & this red earth & pouring rain. For us there is no exile. 2.5THE SOCIAL SPACE OF INDIAN WOMEN Likewise,there is an Indian concept of a woman, infixed in the culture and society, that expects every woman to remain devoted to her duties without fail. Snakes, toads, rats etc.are meant tobe kept out of the house. In this context it can be the external factors like freedom, equality, education, job and rights of woman that seems to be deplorable to the society. The male dominated society expects a woman’s life to be like a house protected from snakes, toads and rats. None of the external factors should waver her mind from herduties like cooking, washing, cleaning etc. and serving the members of the family. The poem also gives reference toIndian wedding and the typicalIndian architecture which are the emblems of the rich Indian culture. 2.6 SUMMARY  Helps to identify the various problematics of gender and culture in Alexander’s selected poems.  Women are oppressed and subjugated by patriarchal norms at different levels  Women arealways exploited and tortured irrespective of ethnicity or other dictates.  Patriarchy does not accept a woman’s individuality or give her due social space or respect.  The plight of women remains all the more same.  Theelementsof native culture with gender issues and deep gender oppression in the society can be understood 40 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

2.7 KEYWORDS  Lyricism -an artist's expression of emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way; the quality of being lyrical  Fragment - A fragment is a small piece that's come off a larger whole, and to fragment is to break  Palimpsest - a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing  Dislocation - Dislocation is a condition that happens when the bones of a joint are knocked out of place  Blaze - a large and often dangerous fire  Bondage - the state of being a slave  House of Congress -the House of Representatives and the Senate. The two houses of Congress have equal but unique roles in the federal government  Anti-Slavery- opposed to slavery an antislavery activist the antislavery movement. 2.8 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Discuss on problems pertaining to the selection of poems for research ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. The Home and Identity: A Postcolonial Journey in the Poems of Meena Alexander ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Analyze on Exiled by Women’s body in the Poems of Meena Alexander ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2.9 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. List the stylistic devices used in 'Birthplace with buried Stones' 2. Summarize the theme of the poem 'Birthplace with buried stones' 41 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3. Appreciate the poem 'Birthplace with buried Stones' 4. Discuss Meena Alexander's poetic style and major themes 5. Write the aptness of the title of the poem 'Birthplace with buried stones' Long Questions 1. Explain how does the Meena Alexander portray the Indianness? 2. Write the R. Parthasarathy’s personal touch in his ‘Exile’ 3. Analyze the style of the poem, shespeaks: Aschoolteacher fromSouth India. 4. Explain the poem, She speaks: A school teacher from South India. 5. Discuss the theme of the poem 'Birthplace with buried Stones' B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Alexander’s multi-migrations make her fall in search of her ______and entity. a. Identity b. Dignity c. Object d. Power 2. Alexander’s poetry is a mingling of native and foreign ______and experiences a. Cultures b. Powers c. Migration d. Analysis 3. Alexander’s works are related to _______and her identity. a. Home b. Garden c. Relation d. Person 4. Her journey of life begins from her native land _____ 42 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

a. India b. America c. Africa d. Britain 5. Her journey of life begins from her native land India and settles to a foreign land ______ a. America b. Africa c. Britain d. India Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-a 2.10 REFERENCES References book  Patel, G. (2007). Poetry with young people. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.  Thomas J. T. (2004). Child poets and the poetry of the playground. Children’s Literature  Bishop, Edward. (1989). A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan Press, London.  Spiropoulu, Angeliki. (2010). Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with W.Benjamin. Palgrave, London. • Textbook references  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56907/raw-meditations-on-money-1-she- speaks-a-school-teacher-from-south-india • Websites  https://d7.drunkenboat.com/db20/reviews/finds-larger-chaos-meena-alexanders- birthplace-buried-stones-wallis-wilde-menozzi  https://ijllnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_3_September_2018/23.pdf 43 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Raw+Meditations+on+Money-a077035217  https://poem.shivyogastudio.in/2021/03/a-school-teacher-from-south-india.html 44 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 3 R. PARTHASARTHY: THE WRITER STRUCTURE 3.0 Learning Objectives 3.1 Author’s Introduction 3.2 Hindu Consciousness 3.3 Summary 3.4 Keywords 3.5 Learning Activity 3.6 Unit End Questions 3.7 References 3.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Recognise the importance of Parthasarathy’s work  Review the writings of Rajagopal Parthasarathy  Redefine the values of translated works 3.1 AUTHOR’ S INTRODUCTION Rajagopal Parthasarathy was born near Trichy in 1934. He was educated in Bombay and in England. He was, for several years, literary editor with Oxford University Press, Chennai and Delhi. His first book, Rough Passage was a runner up for the commonwealth poetry prize in 1977. Recognition followed publication and the book received a fairly good critical attention. His second book A House Divided: Poem of Love and War tells about the turbulent history of the sub-continent. He has also edited Ten Twentieth Century Poets. Parthasarathy, like A.K.Ramanujan, is interested in translation and has translated many Tamil works in to English. One of his major works in translation is the translation of Silappathikaram (The Tale of an Anklet) into English. Parthasarathy feels that more attention should be given to translation and that through translated works we can learn about the cultures of the different parts of the world. He says for a multilingual society like his native India, translation is essential. “A nation renews itself through translation. If it is indifferent to it is in danger of falling of the globe” His works: 45 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Rough Passage is R.Parthasarathy’s masterpiece, which brought him a lot of critical attention and appreciation. It is autobiographical. It has three parts – ‘Exile’,‘Trial’ and ‘Home coming.’ Rough Passage narrates the experiences of a person who leaves his motherland and gets settled abroad for better prospects. It brings out the sense of alienation experienced by him in the other country and also the feeling of guilt for having left his own land, people and language. The poet expresses his sense of alienation and his desire to continue the thoughts of the past to escape from this sense of alienation. His love for his mother tongue finds expression in many of his poems. It is this deep attachment to the mother tongue that makes him feel the loss intensely. He regrets his “whoring after English Gods”. He writes in his “Home Coming”, My tongue in English chains I return after a generation to you I am at the end Of my dravidic tether hunger for you unassuaged I falter, stumble. 3.2 HINDU CONSCIOUSNESS Parthasarathy began to learn English at the age often at a Christian school run by the Don Bosco fathers. His days at school and university were an intense infatuation with England and English Literature. “I was uneasy in India” he writes, “and exposed as I was to English ideas and attitudes, I become hypercritical of everything Indian .... spiritually bankrupt and powerless to absorb the shocks of the twentieth century. India was a ‘nation of sleep walkers’, its people sick in mind and helpless. The nation had, I kept telling myself, lost its will to live. I decided that England would be my future home. And the English language would help me to belong there”. But his encounter with England only produced disenchantment. He was unable to come to terms with the England he saw. “The English autumn was a little too much for my hopefully expanding tropical petals.....I found myself crushed under two hundred years of British rule in India.......My disenchantment was total. I felt betrayed”. In 1963 Parthasarathy spent his first Christmas in England with an old Mend from Bombay at his flat in Hampstead. Every moment of his stay in England and every circumstance there brought to him the realization that he could never function as a poet in English. He says, “I felt embittered and was inclined to agree with Victor Anant that we are all ‘Macaulay’s bastards’.” After Christmas he returned, to his university in the north of England. It was in that January that he began a poem which is included in “Rough Passage” as “Exile 2”. It is, as 46 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Parthasarathy says, about the consequences of British rule. One of the consequences it explores is “the loss of identity with one’s own culture and therefore the need for roots.”21After a year he returned with a new understanding of himself and of India and with the intention of identifying himself with India totally. “Back on Indian soil, under the hot Indian sky, I felt strangely at home: England had been a kind of trial by fire.....I had been around for thirty years and felt literally burnt out. And the ashes are the few poems I have written in English. Only poetry offered a kind of knowledge I despaired of finding anywhere else :Knowledge of oneself.”22 Thus his wish to make England his spiritual home and to settle down as a poet in England and as a part of English environment received a total disillusionment. He realized that the England of his imagination was beyond the bounds of existence. Thus, the early euphoric adolescence was transcended with the re-education Introduction 16 he received in England itself about the necessity to establish his own identity in terms of his Tamil heritage. The feeling of buoyancy for English was thus replaced by a new quest for self-emerging from the cool and alien experience he experienced in England. “The shadow of the second phase of theeducated Indian’s growth soon overtook the poet and he was totally disillusioned with England, a disillusionment which extended itself to the Indian poet’s predicament of writing poetry in an alien tongue. .23” The ‘horrible’ realization by Parthasarathy- “I could never function as a poet in English,” resulted from the sense of root lessness, which made him aware not only of the nourishing qualities of roots but also of the Indian Poet in general writing in English who according to him is confronted with a sense of alienation which is inherent in the linguistic and literary situation itself: “However, for an Indian writing in English,” he observes, “there are at least two problems. And sooner or later he will have to come to terms with them. They are just about unavoidable. The first is the quality of experience he would like to express in English. Now the Indian who writes in the English language gets, to some extent, I can’t help using the word alienated.....The second is the quality of the idioms he uses. There is, obviously, a time lag between the living, creative idiom and the English used in India” Two of Parthasarathy’s concerns have been what he feels to be the lack of an Indian English and the lack of a tradition in which to write. Whereas most writers depend on tone and the various social and cultural associations of words, Indian English poets may feel they are working in a foreign language cut off from such roots. This handicap, Parthasarathy claims, Ramanujan turns into a virtue. Parthasarathy praises Ramanujan for using ‘ordinary and inconspicuous’ words, ‘rarely, if ever, reverberant’. Their strength is in their ‘cold, glass-like quality. It is an attempt to turn language into an artifact.’ Parthasarathy’s concern with writing within a tradition is shown from his interest in such an otherwise insignificant nineteenth-century writer as MadhusudanDutt, who abandoned English verse for Bengali; Parthasarathy himself for a time turned from English to Tamil. Ramanujan offers an example of how to handle biculturalism; writing from the vantage of exile permits him to draw from his past, from his 47 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

memories, from the study of South Indian literature, to write poetry in English which to Parthasarathy, continues the Tamil literary tradition. In its specific regionalism Parthasarathy’s poetry might be said to express Tamil rather than Indian nationalism. Parthasarathy’s views show the influence of T.S. Eliot, whose opinions on culture and literature he has applied to the problems of an Indian and, specifically, a Tamil. In contrast to romantic praise of individual originality, genius and spontaneity, Eliot sees the writer as an Introduction 18 product of a culture which he expresses. The poem should be impersonal; instead of a revelation of feelings it should reflect the culture of the time. The poet edits and revises the material provided by emotions and experience into an impersonal work of art. The best poetry draws upon accepted cultural myths and uses language which reverberates with cultural associations from the past. Tradition is not a chronology of past events but a living experience of the past for which the writer must work by selecting and emphasizing what is useful in his or her situation. Culture is not the international elite culture of the cities but is found in small, rooted, organic communities which share similar beliefs, manners, habits, symbolism, blood stock. Parthasarathy has been in his own way working through these problems in relation to his own uprooting from Tamil culture. But as he feels an Indian poet writing in English cannot make use of the cultural associations of words available to a British writer, he claims to treat English as a foreign language, without reverberations. He attempts to create a tradition of Indian English poets troubled by biculturalism who abandoned English for their first language; and he sees Ramanujan as a start of a new relationship between the English-language Tamil poet and Tamil-language poetry, thus establishing both a continuing tradition and a tradition selected by modem personal need. In contrast to the fragmented, westernized, liberal culture of the large cities, he emphasizes the close-knit family relationships of a specific region, similar Introduction 19 to the way those other followers of Eliot, the Agrarians, sought their roots in the small towns and history of the American South. Although Parthasarathy’s poetry is more openly autobiographical than Eliot’s, he edits and revises it to achieve an impersonal distance, through coolness of tone, regularity of form, economy of language, and by the juxtapositions of images which situate his own life in the context of the effects of colonialism, the decay of the grandeur of the Indian past and the ossification of Tamil culture along with its accompanying modem vulgarity. William Walsh, a perceptive critic of commonwealth Literature, makes the following observations about him: “He has found, after writing for ten years in English, that this very exercise helps to alienate himself from his own civilization... One has the feeling that Parthasarathy’s discomfort is purely intellectual. His own language his own poetry, seems a living contradiction of his own case.”25 These characteristics of the two poets also form a certain pattern of social criticism. For Ramanujan, the macrocosm of the Indian society is epitomized in the microcosm of the family. He neither ridicules nor condemns it for and reason. Indeed, he cherishes romantically and nostalgically India’s simple men, manners and mores. Parthasarathy does not offer any consistent, straightsocial criticism. As he himself states it, he focuses on his “inner conflict 48 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

that arises from Introduction 20 being brought up in two cultures.”26 He points out that both the cultures are decadent. In this thesis an attempt has been made to analyse the extent and nature of the Indian experience as expressed in the poetry of these two important Indo- Anglian poets, A.K. Ramanujan and R. Parthasarathy. These two poets have been grouped together for this study because they have some striking features in common. Both Ramanujan and R. Parthasarathy are South Indians. They are “Indians” and they are modem and contemporaries with post-independence flowering of their talent. What is more, they have felt - overtly or otherwise - the need for roots. In fact, the subtle yet common bond of a feeling of Indianness binds them in a group. The reason why this particular point of view has been adopted is that such efforts do not seem to have been made extensively, on a full-scale level by critics of Indo-Anglian poets. One way of doing it is to glance at some of their notable Indian predecessors who have given expression to the native experience in their English poetry. This may also help in defining and understanding the precise nature or at least the characteristics of their poetic sensibility. It is within this frame of reference that the present study has been made to highlight Diasporic Consciousness in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan and R.Parthasarathy. R. Parthasarathy attempted to set his first step into the world of versification, in 1967, but later he retraced it. Then followed a decade-long silence of preparation for the poet that was broken only in 1977 when his Rough Passage came out from the Oxford University Press under the Three Crowns scheme. This poetical volume, which is described as “Parthasarathy’s poetic autobiography,” is the outcome of his painstaking “revision and elimination” where “all the poems form part of a single poem, as it were.” In his Preface to it, the poet remarks: “It should be considered and read as one poem. In it twenty years’ writing has finally’ settled.” Dedicated to Shobhan and Gautam, Rough Passage indicates more of a journey than of an arriving at a destination, more of continuity than of completion of efforts. The poet is conscious of this fact, and observes: “I have at last composed, but perhaps not completed it.” And the journey that he has taken is fuller of obstacles and hardships than the one of smoothness and easy-going. The title of the book is, therefore, aptly chosen, in other words, it is a telltale title. This slender collection of poems (Rough Passage) speaks volumes of Parthasarathy’s ceaseless experimentation with the English language as well as of his predicament as a poet. He is somewhat tom within by the incompatibility of the twin pulls of the English tongue and the patriotic urges. On the one hand, he can’t undo the labour of some two decades in learning a foreign language; on the other, he can’t ignore the call of the land, the need of the hour. The Tamil past asserts its own claim on him and assures him a safe anchorage. Ultimately, he comes to a kind of compromise between the two diverse pulls. But this compromise left its marks on his poetic art and mind. He had to undergo the trials and tribulations of traumatic experience to be felt by many bilingual creative writers, though not 49 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

so acutely expressed by them. This adds a peculiar pungency to his poetry and turns out to be the touchstone of his personality and perception. Central to Parthasarathy’s themes is a concern with personal responsibility for his life and how the poet lives as a human being. Many of his lines sound like Ezekiel, in their precise, economical but generalized examination of the moral condition of the poet’s life. The autobiographical, confessional thread in Rough Passage is similar to Ezekiel’s Unfinished Man in making a linked sequence of poems from an analysis and record of the author’s life along with resolutions to improve it. The cultural concerns are part of the intellectual, moral awareness; although they take on a different significance, being specifically associated with his Tamil background Parthasarathy has Ezekiel’s dual concern with the coherence of the individual life and with the nature of modem culture. Whereas Parthasarathy is concerned with problems caused by the use of English in India and by his own sense of being uprooted and alienated from a culture, themes which do not appear to concern Ezekiel. A concern with the past, tradition and nostalgia for childhood tend to be characteristic of writers from Hindu families (Parthasarathy, Ramanujan, Mehrotra). Kamala Das has a similar nostalgia for family relations and her childhood. Writers such as Shiv Kumar, Kolatkar or Sharat Chandra may treat traditions skeptically or even satirically, but they are still conscious of them. Rough Passage shows that despite Parthasarathy’s conscious search for a tradition and his attempt to graft himself on a Tamil tradition, a tradition of Indian English poetry has in fact developed from seeds planted by Ezekiel and, as shown by Parthasarathy and Ramanujan, it has some distinctive regional variations. Rough Passage follows a neat, clean three-tier structure. It consists of three sections in all — (i) Exile, (ii) Trial, and (iii) Homecoming. The threefold structure of the book corresponds with the threefold pattern of experience. This fact strikes home when we remember that the poet’s past and present mingle in it beautifully. In the course of his development, the poet seems to shift his euphoric attitude towards the English tongue to one of bitter disenchantment. His quest for identity, his search for the self, leads him step by step to this peculiar enchantment. In a way, the poet’s development along his art is the development of his ‘situation.’ The ‘situation,’ in fact, becomes poetry for him. He depicts his ‘situation’ with immaculate skill and fidelity. The three-tier structure of Rough Passage has not gone unnoticed by critics. M. Sivaramakrishnan maintains that the native whoring after English gods is the thesis, the discovery of root through those very gods is the antithesis, and the resulting synthesis is the Tamil house lass ‘replaced by the exact chronometer of Europe’ So far as thesis and antithesis are concerned, there is nothing objectionable, but Sivaramakrishnan errs in seeing a synthesis where there is actually none. Unto the last, the poet’s predicament remains unresolved. Where is, then, the synthesis? Another critic, V.A. Shahane, seems to be nearer the truth when he states that the threefold structure of the book has a corresponding pattern of 50 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)