It is difficult to find words with which to preface Meena Alexander’s personal memories. As brilliantly captured in this new edition of Fault Lines, the memories are their own preface and introduction to a mesmerizing text culled from a life lived in fragments and migrations, a quest for nadu at home and in exile. So much of her life, she tells us, has been motion and flight, the tactics of self-evasion. But the memory is anything but self-evasive; it is more like facing the self. Hers is a life where the present and the past are simultaneous remembrances of each other. Her here, in India, Sudan, Europe, and the United States, is both everywhere and nowhere, a life of a ceaseless search for answers where the only certainty is the qalam she holds in her hand and with which she stitches together the fragments of her experience to make a healing wholeness. After all, as a writer, she asks, what does she have but the raw materials of her own life?
And what a life! Among the numerous global literary allusions that litter the pages of Fault Lines is the figure of Walt Whitman. Like him, she is a poet who contains multitudes and, not surprisingly, the word multiple is among the most potent of those that frequent these pages. Multiple religions—Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism—are part of her growing up. She dwells in multiple places she calls home, although quite often they are temporary abodes on her way to elsewhere, crossing borders of geography, culture, and language. India, Africa, Europe, and the United States are her home at different times, but they are also her places of exile from which she longs for home. But which home? Memories of the past and present mingle in her. They are memories of emotional, intellectual, and political awakening, memories of wonder, friendship, and trust but also, painfully, as we learn from this new edition’s coda, “Book of Childhood,” of betrayal from he who should have protected her.
It shocks the reader, it shocked me, the fact of something startling where one thought one was safest. But what most fascinates is Meena Alexander’s response to these memories of betrayal. She is honest in confronting the memories, but there is also power and glory in her refusal to succumb to the negative. She has a friend and a guide in words and language, which give her the power to name the world, even when it is a world of violence, racism, divisions, and traditions that threaten the humanity in her, wanting to imprison her creativity behind barbed wires. Yes, Language is her refuge, but even here, there is no absolute certainty. She dwells in many languages, and which language shall she use to make sense of her many crossings? Malayalam, the language of her Kerala childhood? Arabic, the language of her home in Africa? French and English, the languages of colonial imposition?
She opts for English. But she wrestles with it, appropriating it rather than letting it appropriate her—and one feels, in reading this new edition of Fault Lines, that behind the mask of English she is always reaching out to the Malayalam she knows but cannot write. English is the chosen language of her self-expression, but Malayalam houses her being, the raw basis of her art and self-expression. In so doing, Meena Alexander creates a language of astonishing beauty and elegance of thought, which among her many other attributes, like her capacity to juxtapose experiences in times present and past, in locations here and there, is a compelling reason for reading Fault Lines over and over again. Beauty, in Meena Alexander, becomes a revolutionary ethic, an ally of unity over division, love over hatred, life over death, hope over despair.
Creative exploration of experience is her real nadu, and this new edition of Fault Lines is faultless in its determined refusal to compromise with the truth of experience—even when it startles one in areas that one thought one was safest.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Director, International Center for Writing and Translation
University of California, Irvine
2003