Overview
Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Meena Alexander’s memoir traces her evolution as a postcolonial writer from a privileged childhood in India to a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan and then to England and New York City. In this tenth-anniversary edition of Fault Lines, this Alexander challenges the assumptions of life as a South Asian American woman writer in a post-9-11 world. With poetic insight and an honesty that will galvanize readers—both familiar and new—Alexander reveals her difficult recovery from a long-buried childhood trauma that revolutionizes the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, of her writing process and the meaning of memoir, and of her very self, now and before.
Meena Alexander is a poet and professor of English and creative writing at Hunter College and the City University of New York.
Synopsis
This Indian American writer builds upon her acclaimed memoir, named a PW Best Book for 1993.
Publishers Weekly
The reminiscences of this Indian-born poet and novelist ( Nampally Road ) are both evocative and moving, and she presents them in a circular yet completely logical fashion; often they are connected more through theme or meaning than chronology. As she examines issues of identity and a sense of displacement in both her own life and those of her children, her most perceptive moments come in an examination of life in New York, ``the great island city where the poor cry out of tunnels.'' There her son answers a doorman's question--``What are you?''--by claiming to be a Jedi knight, and her daughter's drawing of her family is confused by a preschool teacher who seems not to know the difference between Indian and Native American. Alexander revels in metaphors that align perfectly with their particular subjects; recognition of the way her marriage validates her in the eyes of her family cuts ``like a metallic piece in a too-tight brassiere,'' and ethnicity is ``a violence from within that resists . . . fracturing.'' Although Alexander has lived in many places, including the Sudan and England, and done many things, she finds common ground in her expressive language. (Apr.)