"I am a Fault Line": Meena Alexander and the Poetics of Fragmentation

Abstract

The paper will address the poetics of fragmentation in the works of Meena Alexander, to whom the subject of interaction between memory, language, body and diasporic identity is the emphasis. As it is shown in the analysis, structural and thematic fragmentation are employed by Alexander in her poetry and memoirs to attain the complexities of postcolonial, migrant and female subjectivities, i.e., Fault Lines and Illiterate Heart. Her English, Malayalam, and Hindi as symptoms of linguistic dislocation and, at the same time, the creative resistance to colonialist and patriarchal rule, her focus on the body are anticipations of trauma, memory, and resilience as the central notion of diasporic consciousness. The paper, based on postcolonial theorists, like Homi K. Bhabba, Edouard Glissant, and Gayatri Spivak, and feminist and diaspora studies scholarship, shall argue that the fragmented forms of Alexander, as in the juxtaposition between poetry and prose, the mixing of tongues, is a considered and innovative aesthetic. Her literature does not depict disintegration as nihilistic, in fact, fragmentation is productive since it enables in order to express multidimensional and multifaceted identities and offer fresh modes to comprehend the migrant and postcolonial self. This paper entails making Alexander a key constituent of new writing, the technical and expressive gambit of which expands the literary description of displacement, plurality, and embodied sense of diaspora.