(1951-2018)[/trx_title]
You come to me
a bird shedding gold feathers,
each one a quill scraping my tympanum.
You set a book to my ribs.
Night after night I unclasp it
at the mirror’s edge
alphabets flicker and soar.
Write in the light
of all the languages
you know the earth contains,
you murmur in my ear.
This is pure transport.
Excerpt from “Muse” by Meena Alexander
I knew Meena Alexander. I admired her poetry for quite some time before I finally met her in 2004, when she participated in phatLiterature, A Literary TV Program. I published her work in phati’tude Literary Magazine, and over the years we contacted each other occasionally through email. The last time I saw her was in 2014 at an event at New York University in remembrance of Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka. She was her usual self, bubbly, beaming, playing word games with me. It was great seeing her. I did not know that it would be for the last time.
I liked Meena. While some were put off by her British affect, I was not because when you peeled away the layers, you found a woman as complex as she was interesting who was as true to herself as she was to her work. Unlike many folks I have met along the way, Meena knew who she was, and she was comfortable in her own skin.
When I found out she had been sick and passed away, I really was taken aback. These past few years I have found myself tied to a laptop and a cell phone trying to keep up with the development of 2Leaf Press, and have not participated or attended many events, so I was out of the loop about her illness. Here was a woman who was groundbreaking: the first internationally-acclaimed Indian woman scholar, poet and writer who made a major impact in the literary community and honored in both American and Indian letters. One thing about Meena is that she traveled in and was accepted by many different literary circles, a feat that is a major accomplishment in itself.
One of Meena’s favorite words when discussing herself or her work was “dislocation.” While she also explored themes of feminism, post-colonialism and memory, dislocation was a running theme that could be found in the many poetry volumes, novels, her memoir and critical work she published. I think the feeling of dislocation is attributed to being born in Allahabad, India, four years after India gained its independence from Britain; moving to Sudan, a newly independent country in northeast Africa at the age of five; traveling back and forth between the Sudan and India; attending college in England and returning to India before permanently relocating to New York in 1979 with her husband, David Lelyveld. The other part of it is the South Asian label, what it means to most and its rejection of blackness; growing up in Africa, and how all of this applied to Meena. This dislocation was put to the forefront in her seminal work, Poetics of Dislocation (2009), a collection of Meena’s criticism, prose, poetry, and interviews from 1983 to 2009, which not only serves as a critical framework of her work, it also explores Meena’s relationship to her multiple identities as Indian, African, American, and a woman of color whose literary influences have been impacted by a transnational background. While Meena primarily wrote in English, she has written in French, Hindi and Malayalam, as many languages as the places she identified with.
I come from the nether regions
They serve me pomegranate seeds with morsels of flying fish
From time to time I wear a crown of blood streaked grass.
Excerpt from “Where Do You Come From?” by Meena Alexander
All of her writing is seemingly haunted by place, the loss of it, the return, the constant shifting, the search to find a place in which to be. But while grappling with dislocation had become her life’s work, I argue that Meena simply defied any specific categorization and in time, she rather enjoyed the complexity of her cultural background and was happy with what she had become. It informed her as a human being, and it certainly made her work far more interesting than if she had come from just one place and one culture. What we, the readers get to experience first-hand is Meena’s process of self-creation: creating an identity despite a patchwork past; fighting against definitions demanded by greater society; and fighting against traditions and definitions enforced within the community. We see her visions, connect them to our own, and then we are uplifted.
Place can be defined not only as a physical space, but also a space inside one’s head, and in that regard, Meena always pushed boundaries with discoveries and re-discoveries about herself. Ten years after the initial publication of her award-winning memoir, Fault Lines (1993), Meena added a significant new section to her memoir. Having witnessed the public and private upheavals caused by the events of 9/11/01 in New York, she recalled repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her grandfather, whom she had idealized in the first edition of her memoir. While I thought it brave and daring for her to do so, I also asked myself: Who does this? And how does one respond to that?
While Meena has been recognized as a critically-acclaimed scholar, poetry is really the origin of her being. Her poetry is connected to music. Actually, there was a musicality to Meena when she spoke; it’s almost as if she was metering everything she said and wrote, which is probably the reason why even her critical works were never prosaic, instead it reads like prose. In a nutshell, her poetry is masterfully written. Because she saw the world through poetry, Meena takes the distillation of her epic human and spiritual experience and turns it into pure and exquisite lyricism. In one of her final interviews with The Graduate Center, Meena said, “Poems come as they will, you need to work on them with discipline and care, but you cannot force them. It’s a bit like waiting for a bird to peck seeds out of your palm, some are skittish, some quite bold.”
What I find most interesting about Meena is that scholars, particularly white scholars, love writing about her and her dislocation, almost as if her’s is a unique experience, but even Meena knew better than this. Many people of color have experienced dislocation, whether through slavery, colonization, migration or second class citizenship. What makes Meena exceptional is that she used her words to speak about her experiences to publicize the experience of others. This is perhaps her greatest accomplishment, providing a grid for those to follow, which can be found in the seventeen books of poetry, two books of fiction, and eight books of nonfiction she has published. Language and literature offered Meena the best means through which to negotiate identity.
So how will it end?
You want it straight?
He looked me in the eye:
You will lose weight,
Become more and more tired.
This kind will not enter your bones or brain.
I stared at him, ravished.
Could not pluck my eyes from his old man face.
Excerpt from “Diagnosis” by Meena Alexander
Meena, who was a longtime professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, never let her literary stature get in the way and always remained accessible to students and scholars alike. And once she was diagnosed, she would not let cancer get in the way. She edited, Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing (2018), a wide-ranging anthology of twentieth-century and contemporary writing from India and the Indian diaspora, which amounts to a love letter to her ancestry. She also published what would become her final book of poetry, Atmospheric Embroidery (2018), which lives up to Meena’s sensual lyrics of body, memory and place that evokes the fragile, shifting nature of dwelling in our times.
Meena Alexander had been ailing for some time when she died peacefully in the morning of November 21, 2018 from endometrial serous cancer. She is survived by her husband, David Lelyveld, her children, Adam Lelyveld and Svati Lelyveld, her mother and a sister, Elizabeth Alexander. Meena’s words are destined to outlast her mortal life, and will continue to inspire, especially generations of the dislocated to come. Even still, knowing she is no longer here with us, I will miss her presence.
I am frightened by my own death.
Seeing Krishna on the battlefield Arjuna knelt and wept.
The oven is starting to smoke, there is a cake inside.
For my seventh birthday I wore a pink party dress.
Grandmother is going blind.
Where is Aleppo? She does not know.
Ashwaganda, miracle herb, will it cure us?
Stony soil, cut body parts, periplus of stars
Excerpt from “Parts Of The Day” by Meena Alexander
