FEATURE: Meena Alexander, Poet
Special to South Asia MailBy S. Thenganamannil
Meena Alexander is a major Indo-American poet, born in India. Her 2005 book Indian Love Poems is a unique and very impressive gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalogue the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora.
Indian Love Poems features works from the classical languages of Sanskrit and Tamil and such later languages as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, and English. Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire–both male and female–in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as (the late) Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.
Currently, Meena Alexander is in Europe as a Fullbright specialist in Venice and other places and she will be participating in a Palestenian Literary festival as well, she told me in an interview. Meena has a Ph.D. in English and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she teaches poetry and poetics.
Curious about how she beacame a poet, whether by choice or by chance, I asked her that question. Her response was that she was “fascinated by the sound of words” and at family gatherings she noticed that she has had an aptitude to be poetic even in her mundane conversations. Her parents noticed it as well and encouraged her to write poems which she did at an early age.
Alexander's collections of poetry include Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books, 2008), Raw Silk (2004), and Illiterate Heart (2002), the winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. 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 father was a scientist and he worked in Allahabad and in Sudan. Alexander’s memoir, Fault Lines (1993), was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993.
Alexander divided her childhood between India and Sudan. Since her parents hailed from Kerala, frequent visits to the state kept her Malayalam (a mellifluous language) alive and active. Her maternal grandfather, KK Kuruvilla was a prominent member of the Mar Thoma Church belonging to the ancient St. Thomas tradition.
When she was eighteen, she went to study in England. Not surprisingly, the themes of identity, migration and memory feature recurrently in her writing. Maxine Hong Kingston writes of her work: “Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and a visa. Her voice guides us far away and back home.”
In the poem ‘Blue Lotus’, the poet explores the fraught question of belonging and locates a spiritual residence where the red soil of the Pamba river in Kerala can meet the ash trees on a New York riverbank, where a ruptured identity can be healed by the ancient magic of language, where a piecemeal and broken membership (with all its attendant complications: “tribe, tribute, tribulation”) can be restored to a wholeness that is more than the sum of its parts. It is a place in the heart that is hospitable enough to accommodate a host of trans-cultural and trans-historical literary mentors: Wordsworth, Tagore, Milosz, Mirabai, Akhmatova and Rich. Maxine Hong Kingston writes of her work.
“It is language that offers sanctuary. And it is language that offers strategy: a way to coax life out of rock, a way to make stones sing. Language in Alexander’s poem liberates, empowers and eventually becomes a place in which to live. And thus ‘a short incantation’ ends up becoming a ‘long way home’ ”.
Out of a dozen or so books Alexander has written, two are novels, Nampally Road (1991), and Manhattan Music (1997). The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996) is a volume of poems and essays. Her works of criticism include The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979), and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989). Her memoir, Fault Lines, was reissued by the Feminist Press in 2003.
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.
Mary Elizabeth Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, on February 17, 1951. Although christened Mary Elizabeth, she has been called "Meena" since birth, usually called a ‘pet name’ and, in her fifteenth year, she officially changed her name to Meena. Not so much an act of defiance as one of liberation, Alexander writes: "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, "Meena" meanings in 'fish' in Sanskrit , 'jewelling' in Urdu, and 'port' in Arabic.
It was in Hyderabad that Alexander met her husband, David Lelyveld. In 1979, the two moved to New York City, where they still live with their two children: Adam Kuruvilla Lelyveld (b. 1980) and Svati Mariam Lelyveld (b. 1986). Alexander still takes trips back to “God’s own country”, Kerala, annually. (Research for the article was provided by Sarah Zachariah.)
