Asian American Writer’s Spotlight: Meena Alexander
A Review of Meena Alexander’s Illiterate Heart (2002, TriQuarterly), Raw Silk (2004,TriQuarterly), and Quickly Changing River (2008, TriQuarterly)
Meena Alexander is, of course, one of the most well-known American writers of Asian descent, having penned numerous poetry collections, novels, and memoirs. I focus this post upon Alexander’s three most recent poetry collections: Illiterate Heart (2002), Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008).
Much of the early portions of Illiterate Heart are poems devoted to the lyric speaker’s loss of her father: “My father weighs ninety pounds/ there is sweat in his mouth,/ his feet are on fire/ He is dying like this” (8). These lyrics are characteristic of Alexander’s poetic quality overall; lines tend to have a prosey quality, tend to be on the shorter side, and tend to be extremely accessible. We might more squarely place Alexander within a traditional lyric and confessional mode rather than as a poet committed to formal experimentation and avant-garde stylistics. Once the speaker’s father passes, these poems thus take on an elegiac tonality and work to recall this father’s life story: “Father, when you died, your bones/ were brittle, fit to burn./ They stretched you on a teakwood bench./ Light etched your cheekbones,/ stoked your eyes, your thumbs/ were pale as love-apple fruit” (12). Alexander is always able to make subtle linkages across different poems, thus effecting poetic arcs in her collections. We recall the earlier excerpt about feet being “on fire” and now we get a little bit more this picture with bones being fit to “burn.” The spare lyrics give weight to the speaker’s loss and it is not surprising that the poems following this initial section show a lyric speaker seeking direction and stability: “I am writing a simple set of directions,/ a map to no place in particular:/ At the head of the stairs turn right,/ when you find yourself at the end of the landing/ swing open the bare door – bare meaning/ scraped free of vermilion lacquer” (28). The focus on the “map” appears again and again: “I search for my self/ in a map of indigo” (35). The title poem again returns us to the motif of cartography: “These lines took decades to etch free,/ the heart’s illiterate,/ the map is torn” (68). Other poems, that do not necessarily or directly address the concept of mapping or geography nevertheless, allude to these themes. One of the more formally unique poems, “Taxicabwallah,” is Alexander’s exploration of the prose poem. In this piece, the lyric speaker explores the life and the challenges of a taxi cab driver as he attempts to acculturate to the United States. Of interest here is the fact that the taxi cab driver’s job requires him to know the destinations, that is the mapping, of the city, and therefore, his occupation is one that the lyric speaker would be intimately interested in. At the same time, the directionality of the job stands in stark contrast to the struggles of his immigrant life, a life of dislocation rather than of location. Thus, the collection does not leave us with a developmental trajectory, which is part of the poignancy in documenting the diasporic and immigrant “condition”:
The leaves of the rose tree
splinter and flee; the garden
of my childhood returns to the sea.
The piecework of sanity,
the fretwork of desire,
restive bits and pieces edged into place,
satisfies so little.
In dreams come calling
migrant missing selves,
fire in an old man’s sleeve,
coiled rosebuds struck from a branch.
Our earthly world slit open” (99).
Raw Silk (2004) is a text I have occasionally included in my trauma and Asian American literature course. I have found the collection useful insofar as it delves into the post-9/11 milieu as well as other violent events that have occurred within the last century. Meena Alexander is a writer well affiliated with New York City, thus it is not surprising that Raw Silk would have take this elegiac approach to that urban space.
“School Yard”
You live in a place called Providence
but you grew up in this city
by these walls,
played stickball by the river,
leapt over a path into the playground
by Batter Park.
Now the walls are on fire.
When you call I tell you the fields
by the river are sprinkled with ash.
The children have fled
the new school yard
where they carry the wounded in,
men and women half alive,
skin smoldering (16).
This poem is particularly powerful and constitutes much of the heft of this collection, as Alexander puts words to a city in shock, a city in ruins. She then makes the provocative choice to place this context against that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, in “September Sunlight,” the lyric speaker tells us: “Not so long ago, in Hiroshima/ woman in kimono, bird, and cloud/ turn to shadows staining the ground” (17). But, the point is not so much to equate the events, but to explore the multifocal nature of loss as it is constituted on an epic scale. What is the origin of such events, Alexander’s lyric speaker seems to ask; how does one nation’s treatment of another’s arc out over historical time? Who is lost and what can we remember? Such questions continue in Raw Silk; Alexander’s speaker continually evokes such devastating contexts, moving to the event of Partition. In “For a Friend Whose Father was Killed on the Lahore Border in the 1965 War between India and Pakistan,” the lyric speaker asks and answers: “Where are the burnt plans of the Punjab?/ The killing fields of Partition?/ At the mouth of Central Park/ apple blossoms sifts your breath/ and you search for me” (26), showing us out traumas follow migrants from one nation to another. And in “Fragile Places,” we see how juxtaposition unsettles us:
Who will redeem the real,
cherish fleshly fragment:
jog of hair, splintering mole,
jolt of unlikeness,
desire that turns us lean,
each rift crammed with sweetness,
arrow roiling the eye
of whatever time there may be left,
the skin of mango and rose
wet with smoke (86-87).
The “real,” as the lyric speaker implies, seems to be found at the apex of beauty and violence. Body parts appear everywhere in this excerpt, ranging from hair, eyes, and skin, even when we taste “sweetness” or “cherish” a particular object. This collection exists exactly at the juxtaposition of beauty and violence; how does one aesthetically represent such incredibly harrowing events and historical moments.
Alexander’s latest collection, Quickly Changing River, is appropriately titled in the sense that the collection seems broken up into various fragments focusing on particular lyric themes or issues, but still possesses a fluidity and ferociousness. The first section is the most autobiographical, with many of the poems referencing the lyric speaker’s relationship with her mother as well as revealing much of the details of her life with her three sisters. An autoethnographic perspective does appear in these early poems, detailing in particular graphic scenes of violence experienced by women, as evidenced in the poem “In Kochi By the Sea.” The mother-daughter trope so prominent to Asian American literature finds more fruitful use here, as Alexander extends gender politics to a whole host of cultural icons and sociohistorical situations. For instance, a set of poems, “Lavinia Writes” (26) and “Aletheia (Girl in the River Water)” (28) respectively riff off of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. The second section, “Three for Summer,” clarifies some of the metapoetic impulses of this collection, where Alexander occasionally refers to herself directly within the lyrics. In the title poem, “Quickly Changing River,” the speaker reveals, “Meena floats away,/ I have no stitch of sound to call my own,/ Neither cotton nor silk cling to me./ I’m stuck in a thicket of passengers” (45). Since this poem appears in the context of the speaker traveling to another location, we return to the issue of acculturation and migration that is a hallmark of Alexander’s oeuvre. The section entitled “Raw Meditations on Memory” begins with a searing poem about the difficulties that surround dowries and traditional Indian marriages; the poem details the suicide of three sisters whose father was destined for a hard life based upon the bride prices he negotiated. Alexander reminds us again of the interconnected gender politics in mirroring the three sisters with that of the lyric speaker’s own familial upbringing: “How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters” (53), the lyric speaker reminds us. This section was probably my favorite because it explores both the personal lives of the lyric speaker and her family in poems like “Hunting for Fish” (66) but these are juxtaposed against harrowing lyrics such as the ones found in the dramatic monologue “He Speaks: A Former Slave From Southern Sudan” (55). By this point, it is apparent that these comparisons are what make the collection provocative. Even in instances where we can see the privilege of the lyric speaker, she is not one to willfully avoid this privilege, but extends the scope of her poetic eye to the experiences and the events that require more attention. In “Acqua Alta,” the poem ends with the lyric speaker observing a “man, face painted white/ A yellow star pinned to his chest,/ Staring into water” (81), reminding us that travel always comes with it this attention to the past, to those who have been persecuted, that we cannot always be touristic consumers.
Buy the Books Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Illiterate-Heart-Triquarterly-Books-Alexander/dp/0810151189/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4http://www.amazon.com/Silk-Triquarterly-Books-Meena-Alexander/dp/0810151588/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1http://www.amazon.com/Quickly-Changing-River-Poems-Triquarterly/dp/0810124513/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1315450661&sr=8-2![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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