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key influences and themes
The experience of her early years has led to a recurring theme in her work...
| "I think it's leaving places, leaving places and then returning, and often the returning is in memory. Every year until the age of 18 I would come and go between India and the Sudan, so the idea of departure and how it's woven in with memory is very much something which keeps coming up again and again for me in my work and with that all the many languages which flow in my head."
Meena Alexander |
Truth of the Body
Both India and the Sudan were former British colonies which had recently gained their independence. One effect of colonialism for Alexander was that she had to learn to read, write and speak in English instead of her native Malayalam and this gave added problems when trying to express inner emotions through language - but she found the solution in poetry.
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"Bit
by bit I realised that the form of the poem offered something
I needed, a translation out of the boundaries of the actual,
a dance of words that might free me from my own body.
And I took to reading poems day and night so that history
might not consume me, render me dumb. But that realization
came slowly when, years later in North America, I had
to strip my partial knowledge away so that I could learn
to write the truth of the body, pitted, flawed, unfinished..."
Meena Alexander |
As well as the difficulties of expressing herself in a language which was not her own, she had been brought up in a very traditional way and had not been encouraged to talk or write about the deepest female experiences: "the truth of the body". She describes this truth as molten - melted down and fluid so hard to put into ordinary words鈥�
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"I
mean a truth that often is too molten for ordinary speech,
because ordinary speech is constricted, it's bound as
if in a corset. You're taught by what you're taught by
your parents, taught by your teachers and underneath that
lies emotions, and experiences and bodily memories that
you really have to tear away the other language in order
to write. For me, that process of stripping away is so
critical to be able to tell the truth. I think I write
because there is nowhere else I can put that truth: I
can't just stand on the street and say it - so I think
writing becomes a habitation where these difficult bodily
truths can find a place."
Meena Alexander |
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