A Lonely, Glorious Art (Bloom – May 2018)

A Lonely, Glorious Art

Shoba Viswanathan interviews Meena Alexander for Bloom, May 22, 2018. Read the interview at the link below.

https://bloom-site.com/2018/05/22/a-lonely-glorious-art-q-a-with-meena-alexander/

Yale University Radio (August 2015)

September 30, 2015

Yale University Radio

Interviews from Yale University Radio WYBCX

Click the link below to visit the page:

http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/meena-alexander/

CUNY Video Profile (Fall 2015)

CUNY Video Profile

Meena Alexander Featured in New Video and Q&A

Click the link below to view the video:

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/GC-News/Detail?id=32441

Interview from The Statesman, 2015

August 20, 2015

The Statesman

Interview from The Statesman, August 20, 2015.

Read the interview here. Statesman-Interview-2015

Poetry that Travels (Poetry Foundation – October, 2014)

October 12, 2014

Poetry that Travels

Poetry that Travels – Curtis Fox’s Interview with Meena Alexander

Listen to the interview by clicking the link below:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio?show=Poetry%20Off%20the%20Shelf

Click here to read about Meena Alexander’s new collection of poems, Birthplace with Buried Stones.

Journeys (Poetry Foundation – 7/16/2014)

July 19, 2014

Journeys

Journeys – Jeannie Vansco’s Interview with Meena Alexander

Read the interview by clicking the link below:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/248112

Everything is Broken and Numinous (Interlitq – Issue 21)

Everything is Broken and Numinous

Meena Alexander in conversation with Ronaldo Wilson  on her new book of poetry
Birthplace with Buried Stones

Read the interview by clicking the link below:

http://www.interlitq.org/issue21/meena-alexander/job.php

Click here to read about Meena Alexander’s new collection of poems, Birthplace with Buried Stones.

The City and the Writer: In New York City with Meena Alexander (WORDS without BORDERS, 12/18/2013)

December 18, 2013

The City and the Writer: In New York City with Meena Alexander

Read the interview by clicking the link below:

http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-city-and-the-writer-in-new-york-city-with-meena-alexander

Meena Alexander in Conversation with Russell Leong (AARI – October 2013)

November 09, 2013

Asian/American Research Initiative: Meena Alexander in conversation with Russell Leong on her book of poems Birthplace with Buried Stones (October 18, 2013)

View the video below.

Studio Visit: Meena Alexander (Asian American Writers Workshop, 2013)

August 13, 2013

Studio Visit: Meena Alexander: Interview Meena Alexander (Asian American Writers Workshop, 2013)

“Studio Visit: Meena Alexander: Interview Meena Alexander.” Asian American Writers Workshop. http://aaww.org, 13 Aug. 2013. http://aaww.org/studio-visit-meena-alexander/

Studio Visit: Meena Alexander

This New York-based poet once dreamt of being a trapeze artist.

Interview with Salma and Meena Alexander (The Hindu, 2009)

Comon Sequences: Interview with Salma and Meena Alexander

Santhanam, Kausaly. “Common Sequences.” The Hindu (India), Literary Review, 04 Jan. 2009. http://www.hindu.com/lr/2009/01/04/stories/2009010450310700.htm

Summary of “Comon Sequences”

Meena Alexander and Salma talk about poetry, feminism and the balancing act between their lives and their poetic identity.

One to One: Dr. Meena Alexander (2011)

CUNY TV – “One to One: Dr. Meena Alexander, poet, Distinguished Prof. of English at Hunter College” 2 Jun. 2011

Questions of Faith: Meena Alexander and Dianne Bilyak

March 04, 2013

Questions of Faith: Meena Alexander and Dianne Bilyak

By Dianne Bilyak, Poetry Society of American

“‘Questions of Faith’ is a selection of excerpts from interviews that Dianne Bilyak has conducted over the past decade. The interviews began as her master’s thesis for The Institute of Sacred Music & Arts at Yale Divinity School. The poets were queried about their religious upbringing, current practices, and how these may or may not have influenced their writing, as well as general questions related to faith, doubt, and meaning, and more specific questions related to each poet’s work.”

— “Questions of Faith: Meena Alexander and Dianne Bilyak.” Poetry Society of America. n.d. https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/interviews/page_6/

The Times of India: Interview with Meena Alexander

February 11, 2013

Travelling Helps in Self-Discovery
The Times of India 11 Feb. 2013

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India and raised in both India and Sudan. A poet and a teacher, Alexander’s works reflect her multicultural life in India, Sudan, and the United States. Educated at the University of Khartoum in Sudan (B.A. Hons, 1969) and at the University of Nottingham in England (Ph.D, 1973), Alexander held a number of teaching positions in India and elsewhere. She is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The subjects explored in her writing include language, memory, and the significance of place. She also wrote a semiautobiographical novel set during the 1978 civil unrest in Hyderabad, the Nampally Road (1991). In this interview, she talks about her poetic experiences, journey of lie and message to youth. Excerpts from the interview:

Literature is a vast field with so many different genres, what made you to pick up poetry writing?

I love the music of language, something that transports … that’s what led me to poetry. Also lyric compression. A poem can be borne in memory, it can be written down on scraps of paper. In many ways, it’s an instinctive use of language, using images to spell out the unsayable. Obviously there is a paradox here.

As said by someone, “Writing is more about penning down thoughts, thoughts which are aligned with our imaginations”. So what is the source of your imagination? From where do you get inspiration?

That is and probably will remain a mystery. But buried thoughts, memories, dreams, the pressure of the present, all this enters into the boiling pot of the poem

I had a chance to look at some of your works, the idea of journey has been one of the important elements in your creativity? What do you have to say about it?

This is a very interesting question. There is a power in the imagination that can make different places hang together, even the light falling on a leaf in a far country can evoke childhood. In ancient literature, journey has been an important part of human experience, it’s an ancient trope used to evoke life itself. What does it mean to leave home and then try to return? Even if we don’t physically leave our birthplace, time makes us exiles. I was born in Allahabad, my parents are from Kerala and I have traveled all my life. Sometimes there is a clarity that can come with travel, a possibility of rediscovering oneself and the world. Every journey is special. In Chennai I just stepped out to buy a coconut at my mother’s request, and as I walked down the small street I was able to see something very new. I have also experienced multiple languages, both as a child and an adult. In the 21st century, idea of global migration is important to all of us. In a way, it is path of searching for self.

Even a normal person sees dreams, so what skills he need to become a good poet?

It varies from person to person, you need to believe in the imagination and you should love the rhythm of words. The zone of dreams opens up, through the musicality of rhythm. The poem can pitch towards tragedy, or evoke happiness, but the music of language needs to be there. This carries the spirit along.

You also need the discipline of the poetry, ability to revise and to improve the words so that they cover meaning in the best possible way. I often think of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, and how he started as an artist from making crossings out and deletions in the manuscript of `Purabi’, turning those into birds and flowers and surreal creatures. Revising is the powerful quality of becoming a good artist. You need to keep revising and polishing.

What is the most difficult thing to become a poet? How did you face it?

It is a very hard question. Often people don’t take poetry seriously, they feel it cannot be bought or sold, so what is its value? Then again it is very hard to publish, this is something that every poet faces. Also one writes in loneliness, but this is the way writing goes — the writing that comes from the inner soul. Have faith in yourself. The world generally does not need your poems, so you can always face many rejections, but you just have to keep going. I once heard the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky speak of how hard it is to be a poet. While fiction writers got paid for their writings, the poet has to send something out and wait for it to be rejected, and send it out again! So hang in there, have faith. Keep writing and keep making the poems better.

You have also written literary critic books in past. So in your view, how important it is for an artist to be a good critic?

I really don’t think a writer has to be a critic in a formal fashion. But each time you read something else, you measure it and try to make sense of it and learn from it, it is a kind of self-evaluation.

We now see the influx of technology in our day-to-day work. How did the writing changed from letter writing of 60s to merely tweeting in 140 words today? And how will it change the path of writing in future?

I don’t think that we will see the end of writing. At the same time there is no question in my mind that advent of cyberspace has radically altered the space of imagination. Happenings at one part of the world are now spreading to the other parts of the world so fast. Distances appear to collapse and it also affects the mind of the writer. New forms of writing and micro messaging, and the social media are important too. We do not yet have the language perhaps to speak of this. I myself have composed lines of poetry on my cell phone and sent it to myself. In this way a poem called `Experimental Geography’ came into being. In Japan, recently there has been some news about a novel that has been written on a cellphone.

What do you have to say about your Indian connection? And how did it help you to reach the position you are in today?

India is always in my heart. Yes, I am a New Yorker now, I live in this city, but my earliest thoughts and feelings and desires were formed in India and marked, even in the diaspora by being part of an Indian family. One does not lose these things.

Let’s talk about involvement of poems in society. The best example, I can remember is from Indian independence movement where poems inspired people to fight for their freedom. Do you think that the poems can still play the same role in uniting the society against various causes?

I think that poems are so important in times of tumult, they can spell out the unspeakable; bring the political and the deeply personal together.

Despite being so good, still not many Indian writers are known at the world stage. Where do you see the problem lies? What can be done to change this?

There is amazing writing coming out of India, in the Indian languages and also in English. More of it should be known worldwide, I completely agree. India is not just country, it is a subcontinent offering wide and rich diversity in our regional languages like Oriya, Hindi, Malyalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali etc. But these works need to be properly translated for world audience.

At the same time, it is not necessary to see English as the only outlet. Chinese, for example, will become a global language in future. Indian literature which is already multilingual and multicultural can easily make entry into this new and globalized world.

With majority (more than 50%) of the Indian population still young, do you see in future an improvement in the literature activities in India?

Each time I return, and I come back each year, sometimes twice a year, I recognize the exuberance, and vitality of literature in India. The ancient traditions are still remaining, but also reworked by the new. Yes, I do think the internet helps. Young people and others too, can publish their work and it’s immediately available across all sorts of borders.

India is an extraordinary site for forms of literary activity. The country has a thriving press which is free and has ability to deal with current issues.

You have lived in many countries (Sudan, England, India and US mainly). How the intersection of different cultures influenced your writing?

It is a very hard question Ankit. Perhaps the act of writing is to make a space where all these different strands come together, ‘A house of words’.

Maxine Hong Kingston has said, “Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted”. Going through the same lines, how far you have come in your work and how much more will you like to achieve?

I have so much more to write. I only hope I can do it. I always feel I am starting from scratch. It keeps one humble. You never know if the words will come.

Any message do you want to give to the current young generation to achieve goals from your own life experiences?

The best advice I can give is to remain focus and disciplined. Have the passion to achieve your goals and the persistence. All of us face difficulties in life sooner or later and in that case if you ask yourself, how do I face it? So much depends on how you come to terms with what is given to you. My advice is: Hang in there and have faith in your abilities.

— From Khandelwal, Ankit. “Traveling Helps in Self-Discovery.” The Times of India, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. 11 Feb. 2013. Web. 26 May 2013.

Author TV: Meena Alexander (2013)

January 19, 2013

Author TV: Meena Alexander (2013)

Meena Alexander talks about her novel Nampally Road at the Hypderbad Literary Festival.

“Meena Alexander.” AuthorTV. AuthorTV.in. YouTube Video. 19 Jan. 2013.

View the video below.

“Indian Ocean Flows” (Black Renaissance Magazine, 2010)

Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi

Interview with Black Renaissance Magazine (2010)

Download Interview with Black Renaissance Magazine (PDF)

Interview with The Writer Magazine (2009)

March 05, 2009

Interview with The Writer Magazine (2009)

Download Interview with The Writer Magazine (PDF)

“Writing Childhood and the Indian Ocean” (Interview, 2006)

April 02, 2006

Thunderstorm clouds over the Indian Ocean

“Writing Childhood and the Indian Ocean”

Interview with Meena Alexander

On November 7, 2006, as she was writing her book Quickly Changing River, Meena Alexander was interviewed by May Joseph in New York City.

J:  Meena, I’d like you to talk about writing childhood.

A:  Ah, writing childhood.  Well, where to start?  I have a poem I wrote a long time ago in a volume called Stone Roots.  The poem is called Childhood, and there are lines that run:

Quite early as a child

I understood

flesh was not stone…

Childhood for me really is the ground of much of what I write. Privileged territory.  Privileged not because it is a locus of nostalgia, really, as because I think it’s in childhood that the sensations, the bodily sensations which animate what I write, are most intense and vivid, and the connections between consciousness and things is powerful and unmediated in a way, and the world is live and quick.

And I think that those first recollections, as indeed Wordsworth spoke about them, I mean those are very strong for me.  So that childhood even as it is ground, is continually returned to and reinvented, and becomes… a powerful source from which I write.  If I were a painter I would think in terms of dipping my brush into the colors of childhood.  Also, for me childhood is Kerala, the southwest coast of India, and both my mother’s house, which you’ve seen, in Tiruvalla, and also my father’s house, which has now been sold, with the very old paddy fields all around it.  (My father’s house) was an ancestral house, which I speak of in a poem called The Storm.  And then I turned five on the Indian Ocean.

In fact, I’ve just finished writing a small prose poem piece for my book Poetics of Dislocation called Crossing the Indian Ocean.   I just finished it today.  About having my fifth birthday on the water, just on the ocean, and what that means to me in terms of my poetry.  So childhood wasn’t just emplacement, it was also being cast loose on the waters, very young.  And not knowing what the other side would be, well, not knowing what the other part of the world would be.  And going to a different language and a different place, a different climate, so that everything that I’d known and loved, or known and loved and feared, was left behind.  I didn’t even know what the word “behind” meant.  And I didn’t know what it meant to go back and forth so that you didn’t just have one place, you had several places –and then perhaps you had no place, or you had many places again.

Childhood in fact established for me very early the materials of my writing.

And I think that is what I want to say in the end.  Years ago I had an office at Hunter next to Philip Roth.  He was teaching there for a year.  He said something very interesting to me.  He said, “Meena, if you are a writer, all you have is what you’re born to, it’s just this stuff, this biography, there’s nothing else.”  And I guess it’s taken me many years to realize the deep truth of that.  You just have this pot of stuff that you’re given at birth.  And you make of it what you will.  But nevertheless, it’s already made in some fashion.  And that’s a very compelling and disturbing thought, which really, if one lays it out in the sun and looks at it, teaches one great humility.

J:  I wanted to return to this idea of place and childhood, and ask you how the Indian Ocean plays in this space of writing childhood.  You talk about your birthday aboard the ship on the Indian Ocean.  I’d like to hear more about that.

A:  The Indian Ocean … In Kerala, one was always aware that this was land bounded by the Ocean, in fact of course the earliest myth of Kerala is that Parasurama flung an axe into the water and out of it rose the land of Kerala.  And the axe, curiously enough, was bloodied because he’d committed matricide; he’d killed his mother, because he thought that she was lusting after another man, not his father.  So there’s this whole rather violent myth of origin to the land that I come from.

But the water’s always there, the Indian Ocean has always been there.  When I was a child we’d go to visit Kanya Kumari and the three seas were pointed out to me – the Bay of Bengal in the east, the Arabian Sea in the west, and south of us and all around, the Indian Ocean.  For centuries there’d been peaceful trade back and forth between the coast of Kerala with Rome and Persia and China.  Ancient Roman coins were found on the coast. All this of course well before European colonization in the sixteenth century.

The Indian Ocean as I learnt to read it, became a site of extraordinary hybrid inventiveness, a manifest if you wish, for the making of poetry.  The ocean allows you to conceive of a life which has multiple anchorages, and yet is not bound to one specific place.  I think of Gandhi, and how he kept crossing the Indian Ocean and I like to think that many of his most  radical thoughts, as they came to him were freed  from the specific pressures of place.

In fact place is naturalized power, when you go out onto the ocean something else happens, you have to throw away that other chart.  And so for me, the idea of the ocean as a space where one might rethink what land has enforced, is a very interesting possibility, and is really just something I’m just now starting to unravel.

J:  I want to push you further and ask you how the new edition of Fault Lines works into your longer project of writing childhood. It seems to me there’s childhood in a lot of your work.  It’s been an ongoing excavation to you, has been one of your terms. But it seems to me that the last section of Fault Lines is this very powerful return to childhood.  And I wanted to ask you about that.  What is “Stone Eating Girl”?  Tell me about

“Stone Eating Girl”.

A:  Well simply, she is a girl who eats stones. Writing Fault Lines I had to face a great disturbance that lay at the heart of my childhood that I actually could not put into words before.  Which is why it was very important for me to attach it to this book, albeit giving it a rather odd shape.  But it isn’t just tacking on.  In a sense, I remade the forms so that I have an echoing list of chapters where you have the same title with variation.  So that in the older edition, you know, the older section, in chapter title there’ll be another chapter title.  And they’re not exactly the same, you know—the same material will be returned to, but with difference

And in a sense for me it also lays bare the way in which the past is continually returned to and never the same, so that the notion of difference lies at the heart of our awareness or access to the past.  There is a kind of simplicity there, and an intensity of apprehension.  Not that one need necessarily lose it in later life, but you might, and you have to in a sense, develop shields and armor to go through life, but I believe there is something very simple and pure in how a child can see the world.  And then, perhaps, almost in order to survive, one learns to forget, one learns to dissemble, even to oneself, and one learns languages which really do not necessarily accord with the truth as your perceive it.  But you use, you deploy those languages, you use them.

And I think poetry becomes this powerful cleansing pool into which one might jump and return hopefully alive and renewed,. And memory is like that, right, it’s not a very safe place.

J:  That’s very well put, it’s not a very safe place, and it seems to me in Fault Lines you explored that very unsafe place of desire and memory and writing.  Could you talk a little bit about desire and this return to, as you said in Dictionary of Desire, a very powerful section, you talk about memory and desire and writing.

A:  Well, I think, in that section called Dictionary of Desire, I think, if I recall correctly, I was talking about some words that I strung together in different languages, very simple words like, girl, book, tree, I think stone, perhaps, and writing them down in English and in French and in Arabic, and in *Malayalam*, as if those elements could then constitute the world for me. And of course this is the dream of poetry, as a child you write single words and a poet writes images.  So I think that, in a sense, it was an attempt to build up a world freed from taxonomies, or should I say rather, freed from hierarchies.  A world that stretched out… as much of the world as you’ve experienced could come into the poem, so there are multiple languages in the poem and whatever you’re writing is a dictionary.

And desire of course is what makes you turn to the world and renew yourself in the world, as opposed to apart from the world, right?  In that sense desire is always for the Other, and the Other is always in the world.  Insofar as the Other is in oneself then you turn to that part of yourself and try to face it, so there’s also this section called Dark Mirror.

J: You are talking about this unsafe place, and I was drawn by the fraught unpacking of nationalism, childhood, and the space of trauma that the last section of Fault Lines really delves into.  Could you talk more about what’s happening there?

A:  Well, I don’t know if I could talk about it…

J:  Uneasy, it’s uneasy.

A:  …you know, in the sense that, in a sense you need to unpack it.

J:  Gandhi figures prominently in your work, and in this particular section, it’s interesting how Gandhi and this traumatic childhood converges.

A:  Right, right.

J:  It’s silencing, but powerful writing.  Difficult to read.

A:  In The Shock of Arrival I have a whole section on Gandhi cutting the hair of the girls in Phoenix Farm.  Do you know the story?  It’s in South Africa, the boys and girls were playing together in the water and then some of the boys started teasing some of the girls, and Gandhi felt that the girls—there was one particular girl who was being should bear a mark on her body so that this would be a sign to the boys not to torment her again.  So he took her aside and over the protests of the women of Phoenix Farm he cut her hair off, which is barbarous, and he says, this hand which is writing this took up a pair of scissors and cut off her hair.  And in what I write I try to imagine what it might have been like for this child.

And so I think that there is something in the project of nationalism, in the ethical project of nationalism, as it is conceived, that can be extraordinarily damaging to individual persons.  I was brought up in almost this religion of Gandhism, of nationalism, as an ethical imperative, and its austerities, and its this and its that.  And no doubt it was an enormously powerful force in one’s childhood and in one’s growing up, with the whole world of decolonization after the taking apart of colonialism.

But nevertheless, there are aspects to it which are very disturbing, and I think one needs to speak about.  And for me the way to speak about them is very personally, because that’s the kind of writing I do.  I’m not a historian or a critic or even a cultural critic; I mean, I’m a poet in this.  So that for me the way to understand history if you wish, or even to get at history, however one might catch it by the tail, is really to go back into the great simplicities of ones early life, when things were as they were given.  And then try to think about how one might have questioned them or revolted against them.  And also what damage was done.  Because it is also a narrative of damage, I think.

So I think that through both the sexual travel, and the national, the making of a nation, and what that had to do with disturbances at home.  So that’s a little bit, I think, I mean I’m just putting it into…

J:  That’s extremely interesting.  This edition of Fault Lines, the last section, is very melancholic.  It’s poignant and incredibly disturbing.

A:  It is quite dark.

J:   There’s a pathos, an unflinching look at deep melancholia that haunts the text.  Your turn to writing childhood in the specific way you do is interesting.  The question the new edition of Faultlines raises is, what is the politics of writing childhood?  Why return now?

A:  Because it’s there for me to deal with.  Because I have to.  That’s as simple as the answer gets.  It was just something I had to do.  Now what is the politics of that I don’t know.  You’ll have to…  And so the question about the politics of it is something you would ask a reader, I think.  At least not… because as a writer I don’t know.  I did it because I had to do it.  Is there a politics in that?  Surely, but I don’t know what.  I mean that is for someone else to unpack.

One thing you have not mentioned is that this was written in the aftermath of 911, and it’s a whole chapter entitled Lyric in a Time of Violence, a poem, and people saying that, well, you wrote this traumatic piece on childhood in the aftermath of a larger event which was shared in space.  So if you want to go at it that way, that’s one way to get it.

What did you mean?  If someone asked you what would you say?

J:  Well, when I say political I mean there’s a kind of detailed investigation of the uneasy space of childhood that is easily pushed under the rug.

A:  Right.

J:  Childhood is incredibly painful, formative and critical to the formation of the nation.  Yet children in the end are the forgotten story.

A:  Family and nation.  It’s the patrie, the fatherland, right?

J:  Well said.  I’m thinking of other writings on childhood, and this move to ask questions about childhood.  At a particular moment in Walter Benjamin’s work, his writings probe the vagaries of childhood.  He returns to the place of childhood.

A:  He has the Berlin Chronicle.   But I don’t know where it is in his writing life.

J:  I read his turn to the past as a deliberate glance backwards, like the angel of history falling through time to calibrate the present.  I do believe your turn to the past is not unlike Benjamin’s, a marking of the emotive distance you have traveled through spatial disjuncture.  Could you address how the themes of childhood and shame meld in your work?

A:  Shame is very important.  I was always brought up in this traditional way.  Where you’re supposed to be ashamed of many things including your our own body.  And shame was considered very powerful.  It was a fierce pedagogical tool.  It seems like a very weird way to say it, but you’re supposed to be ashamed and then learn how to behave. Its all at the level of your body in the world and how others see you.  Particularly for girls, you know, that you were supposed to be ashamed of certain things because that was the way you grew up in the core of society.

And of course for me as I grew up, I struggled with what it meant to write, to write the truth of the body, even what it might mean to write from the body, as someone who had learnt shame I think this idea of shame located in the body, and being ashamed of one’s body then became quite complex.  When you went into multiracial situations or multiethnic situations, when you crossed certain borders where who you were was not taken for granted, or not good enough, at such times what you were taught to learn and absorb early in childhood took on a whole other valence.  So I’m not talking just about intimate family spaces or gender or matters of desire.  I’m also talking about border crossings, territories and proscriptions.  And I think that this is where Gandhi is also important, because he went to South Africa and instead of being ashamed of being an Indian he told Indians to burn their passes.  In other words he refuted very powerfully from his own version of a tradition, this imposition of shame on the body.

But then he went back to India and he realized that Untouchability was a terrible sin.  Still as often happens in radical social thinkers, even as they challenge something that is damaging to society at large, they retain within themselves blind spots.  It’s always like that;  look at Gandhi, look at Marx.  They are part of history in that.

This question of shame is also something very deeply personal and it’s almost something that you can’t wash yourself free of, and that was fascinating to me and something very terrible.  And I had to try and think about that in a sense so that it becomes actually quite important in what I’m writing now.

J:  Your books Shock of Arrival, Illiterate Heart, Fault Lines, Quickly Changing River, and Poetics of Dislocation, all grapple with “multiple migrations,” and the task of working childhood through perpetual displacement.  Could you talk more about this palimpsest of place in childhood that weaves through your work?

A:  Well, right from earliest childhood I knew that there was another place.  I was born in Allahabad I wasn’t from there.  I went back to Kerala because I come from there, but I didn’t live there for extended periods.  So place was very powerful, filled with other people, other children, other families, the sun, the moon, the grass, the clouds, you know, the air.  I traveled a lot as a child, even within the boundaries of India, and at the age of five went off to North Africa.  But I knew that there were many places.  What was constant was my parents and the familial structure.  But places kept changing, houses kept changing.  And so I think that the thing I’m writing now is almost like a kind of floating childhood.

That is why the ocean becomes very important for me because that is where you have a floating house – on the water.  It’s the boat.  And I think that it’s also very provisional.  There’s something that you’re forced to reckon with, because even as the force of childhood affections are such that you want to hold on forever, and you are holding on forever or what you think is ever, there is something in the nature of the sort of mobility that one had that forces one apart. Whereas words like globalization meant nothing at the time this transnational ability that we had was enforced on me as a child.  I didn’t choose it—I just went with my early life with my parents.  That inevitably structured my work.

And I would even like to argue that it has an effect on what one might call the ontology of ones work – in the nature of poetry, something which implicates Being very powerfully, and even allows for it, opens it, opens it up as it were.  I think of Heidegger’s essays on poetry and thought, collected in Poetry Language Thought.

Place for me is manifold.  It can be luminous.  It can also be something that is shattering, and shattered in that sense.

J:  As a closing thought, could you elaborate on the idea of the space of dwelling?  Your writings investigate the cartographic space of dwelling through the forgotten lives of childhood. Diaspora and multiple migrations become off shoots of this nexus of childhood and dwelling in your texts.

A:  Well I think that this idea of dwelling, and Heidegger talks about it precisely, in his writings you see the path and you see the stone, and you dwell… and for him to dwell in that fashion is to dwell poetically.  Because this is what poesis is:  it is dwelling on earth, keeping a residence on earth.  You see, that for me is the great task of poetry; which is to allow one to dwell.  And it is particularly difficult in some ways, or seems to be difficult in some ways, if one has had a childhood where dwelling cannot be taken for granted.  I don’t just mean dwelling in the deep sense, I mean just ordinary habitations.  And so what I’m trying to do is to think of diasporas or  … diasporas through childhood.  And it seems to me that a whole other set of markers are cast into view.  Not with kinds of things that we talk about in adult knowledges, in the adult production of knowledge if you wish, but as a child deals with it sensorially and with an intensity that perhaps adults have learnt to be fearful of.

Interviewer: May Joseph, Pratt Institute, NYC, November 7, 2006

Email: may.joseph@earthlink.net
Meena Alexander Interview # 2
November 7th, 2006
Edited by Meena Alexander, Feb 2009
Edited by May Joseph September 22, 2009

— “Meena Alexander: Writing Childhood and the Indian Ocean” Inverview by May Joseph. The Mom Egg. www.themomegg.com. 22 Feb. 2009. http://www.themomegg.com/themomegg/Alexander.html

An Interview with Meena Alexander from Kenyon Review (2006)

March 04, 2006

Interview with Meena Alexander (2006)

Maxey, Ruth. “Interview with Meena Alexander.” Kenyon Review: New Series 28.1 (Winter 2006) Volume XXVIII Number 1

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. She now lives in New York City, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her eight volumes of poetry include the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004).

Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer’s subjectivity, and with the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders, while a number of her recent poems, such as “Late, There Was an Island” and “Triptych in a Time of War,” deal with the aftermath of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.

Alexander has produced the acclaimed autobiography Fault Lines (1993), chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). She is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a volume of notes and essays on poetry, migration, and memory.

This interview took place at the Graduate Center, City University of New York on February 25 and 28, 2005.

Ruth Maxey: What do you see as the task of poetry?
Meena Alexander: In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist. I believe this very deeply and I see it as an effort to enter into the complications of the moment even if they are violent but through that, in some measure, the task of poetry is to reconcile us to the world—not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense. Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus that there’s only one philosophical question: whether to commit suicide. And he says, “the point is to live.” He says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy as he pushes the stone up (1) Seen in that way, the act of writing is intrinsic to the act of living. It’s as if Sisyphus has to keep reinventing the wheel: once he goes up, the wheel rolls down and he has to start again. It’s a punishment but it’s also the way in which he grows in the world.

I would be the happiest being on earth if I could say, “I’ve written this wonderful book of poems.” I wouldn’t have to write anymore. I could lie in the sun. Why does one want to blow one’s brains out on these bits of paper? It’s an enormous psychic effort and so what it does do is extraordinary because there is an amazing clarity that you have for a little while. When you complete a work, you breathe deeply and think, “Oh yes, I’ve done it!” But then you have to start again.

By finishing one work, one has actually learned something that allows one to go on to make the next. But you don’t know that consciously because if you did, it would get in your way, so each time the hope is that you’re able to work with the material at hand but perhaps in a slightly different way. But you don’t know that up front, that’s the discipline you’ve learned. You have to look away from it.

I think the poem is an invention that exists in spite of history. Most of the forces in our ordinary lives as we live them now conspire against the making of a poem. There might be some space for the published poem but not for the creation. No ritualized space that one is given, where one is allowed to sit and brood, although universities give you a modicum of that. Poetry is a forsaken art, not for those who write or practice it, but for many others. Yet there is a kind of redress that poetry offers. I’m using the words of Seamus Heaney, who has a wonderful essay “The Redress of Poetry” in his Oxford lectures, where he talks about poetry as something existing within the gravitational pull of history and yet offering, precisely because of that pull, a redress or a balance (2). At this moment in my life, this is the very best possible telling or accounting that I have found in all my searching of what it is that poetry does.

RM: I want to touch on your relationship to Wordsworth. In Nampally Road, Mira defends her decision to teach his work in India. I was interested to see that because for other postcolonial writers, the study of Wordsworth in particular is a contested area.
MA: When I went to the Royal Festival Hall [in London] in 2002 for Poetry International, they asked each poet who our presiding spirit in poetry was, and I chose Wordsworth. And I said, “In picking Wordsworth I have to admit to a pained love that is not easy to speak of, an attachment so deep that I have sometimes felt it would be easier to deny it.” And then I asked myself an important question, “Why Wordsworth?” And I answered, “Because his words cut straight to the heart of my childhood —the trauma, the blessing, the interior life the child bears within.” And so often that interior life is cut away from the realm of words. Yet I felt that in order to read his work, I had to cross a line of blood. There is, of course, also his notion of the growth of a poet’s mind. The Prelude was an architecture. He was building this huge unfinished thing when he made The Prelude.

So I got this idea that the great poem was a house that was co-extensive with a felt understanding of the self in growth. The Prelude was actually critical to this enterprise but then growing to consciousness, I felt that everything Wordsworth stood for was completely inimical to where I’m coming from. In fact, the title poem of Illiterate Heart is about meeting these poets—one is an Indian poet, “a mahakavi from the temples of right thought.” The other is Wordsworth as I imagine him: “Or one in white flannels / unerringly English, lured from Dove Cottage, / transfixed by carousels of blood, / Danton’s daring, stumbling over stones / never noticing his outstretched / hand passed through me” (3). I wasn’t even flesh to that mode of apprehension. In other words, I didn’t exist. Yet he was an extraordinary poet.

RM: You’ve said that poetry is more crystalline, while fiction and life-writing give you more scope for exploring ideas. How do you see the transition in your work between genres? And does prose allow you to explore more disturbing themes?
MA: How interesting. It might. On the other hand, the poem “Triptych in a Time of War” [Raw Silk] is quite disturbing but it does use longer lines, so it’s like a prose poem almost. I think there’s a sort of continuum but what the prose essay or fiction allows me to do is almost like a clearing of the underbrush, going ahead as if you’re on uncharted territory, filled with vines, underbrush, wild grass, and rocks, and clearing a space. Then once you’ve cleared the space, you can do the poem there.

Prose has a different function for me because it’s broad, using a different sort of canvas. But once I’ve done that, there is the poem that I have to make. Then it’s also the case that for the book of essays that I’m putting together, I often write a poem and then work from that. In other words, I get to a place in my understanding through the poems, but it’s not articulated as such. It’s not set out in discursive thought because it’s a poem. And then I have to move from that and I can use the prose essay to try and reflect on where this other, new place is. Could I do it without writing prose? Yes, perhaps. I imagine I could. But it’s fun to do, it helps me, and also you know in classical Indian writing, there was a tradition of kavya, which existed before there was the distinction between prose and poetry. Kavya can be a prose poem, highly charged. I think some of the writing in the new edition of Fault Lines is like that. These are fluid, unquiet borders for me, because there is traffic both ways.

RM: That’s a helpful way of thinking about it because so much of your work is about migration and geographical borders, cultural borders and thresholds
MA: Right, and I obviously write a certain kind of prose that is, in its texture, closer to the sorts of little knots that an embroiderer uses. The way it works is through an image rather than emplotment.

RM: Yes, I noticed in Fault Lines, for example, that you used very short paragraphs, sometimes only two lines.
MA: That’s something that comes from the poem rather than from a certain kind of prose. I’m not a great plot person. That isn’t the way my head works. I work much more with the image in an instant of time and the resonance that it opens up for the next thing, work of art, or piece of thought.

RM: In Fault Lines, you speak about “making up memories.” To what degree are memories constructed? Is there a deliberately blurred line between fiction and memoir in your work?
MA: In order to make memoir, you have to make things up as well. Even memories are made up at some level. You remember things but you don’t often have the words, so as soon as you start putting the words in place, you’re constructing it in the framework of the present. And you have to dramatize certain things and not others. With the memoir it was only when I started writing that I started to remember. It was as if the act of writing allowed a space within which one could remember.

RM: Can we talk about your relationship with language? I know the idea of heteroglossia is very important in your work: your use of English is informed by Arabic, French, Malayalam, Hindi. How do these other languages form part of your creative process when you’re writing in English?
MA: It probably works at the level of rhythm as much as anything and perhaps also at the level of image because thoughts are given to us at an almost pre-linguistic level. They come to you without words; an idea can come to you quite early in life. You pick up certain kinds of possibilities of rhythm from your mother’s speech or the kinds of houses in which you grow up, and when the art is accurate it draws on that. Some of my poems have been translated into Malayalam and people have sometimes remarked on how certain kinds of rhythms in a poem are from Malayalam. That may be true, but I can’t really read or write Malayalam, though I speak it fluently. My mother tongue exists as orality for me.

So inevitably in the second language that one inhabits – I use that term “inhabits” advisedly—there is a way of making accommodation for what has not yet been thought and I think that sort of accommodation is what a poem allows. I have multiple languages working for me. But I have always grown up in a world where there were things one did not understand, because there were languages that were not completely accessible: you use one language in the marketplace, another in the kitchen, another in the bedroom or the study. And then your friends are those who often speak some of those languages as well and it just gives you a particular sense of being in a world where you can be comfortable even though linguistically the world is not really knowable. I think this is a very good hedge against a certain kind of rational understanding, the presumption of linguistic clarity or transparency, post-Enlightenment, that sense that everything can be known and a light can be shone into all parts of one’s thought.

RM: You have said that “the woman poet who faces the borders her body must cross, racial, sexual borders, is forced to invent a form that springs out without canonical support” (4). What form do you feel you’ve invented? And what is your position now in relation to the canon?
MA: It’s a very complicated and important question and it’s difficult for me to think about. I think the mind is free and one ought to be able to draw upon whatever one needs. Why shouldn’t I teach Wordsworth? Why shouldn’t I draw on him for what I write? Why should I only draw upon women or women of color? It’s ridiculous. There was a time when I read a great deal of poetry by women and it was very important to me to do that. I was fascinated by what it might mean to make poetry as a woman, because there are certain kinds of burdens that form you or that you inherit. They’re part of being in a particular body. And not just that, it’s also the idea that aspects of what are called or thought of as “canonical literature” are not available to you.

That is a painful knowledge, which is why I wrote my book Women in Romanticism, because although there are women poets who are enshrined in the canon in India, or in China or elsewhere, within English poetry of a certain era, certainly, the burden of knowledge has gone the other way. Implicitly the poet is still male. I’m not saying that the development of a woman poet requires that she enter into overt reflections on these issues. But I think it is necessary that she faces them, if only in the solitude of making the work of art. So you cannot evade it even if the artwork in no way overtly relates to it. It is formed within the pressure of a gendered history.

There was a time when I had a real quarrel with form in poetry. I’m not there now. I actually value it very deeply. But if you’d asked me ten years ago, I’d have felt that the orality of my experience and particularly an experience which involved a rich, pre-linguistic awareness of other languages (and this takes us back to the question of heteroglossia), which is what I wanted to put into my English poems, would have been destroyed had I tried to achieve what we think of as a strict form. So I went for certain kinds of forms which were looser, and coming to America was wonderful for that, because American poetry does have a capaciousness in terms of how form works because vernacular is enshrined in it also.

In that sense, the passage to America has been very important for me as a poet, whereas if I’d gone to England I wouldn’t have achieved this. English poetry is much more bound within the canonical tradition, for better and worse. Even as within contemporary American writing there is an idea of a canon, but it’s of very recent provenance. If you come from a culture like India or Britain you have an ancient history, whereas America has all the energy and excitement of novelty and the dangers and difficulties of that also. When I came to America, I found the language amazingly liberating. It was very exciting for me to hear American English, not that I can speak it well, but I think in it. It allowed me to make a shift into a different kind of spelling-out of what one might be. That and the idea of being an immigrant. Both of those were very liberating.

RM: What do you still hope to achieve as a writer?
MA: I want to write some poems! I keep writing because I’m never really satisfied with anything that I do. It’s as if I’m driven from the inside because I don’t rest in what I’ve already written. I can’t. I’m not built that way. And so there is always the next poem. When I was young, I did think a poet should be like Rimbaud. Do one’s life’s work very young. Now I think of myself as someone who has a whole lot of work ahead of her.

Notes

(1) Camus, A. Le Mythe de Sisyphe: Essai sur l’Absurde. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1942. 92, 168.

(2) Heaney, S. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London: Faber, 1995. 3-4.

(3) Alexander, M. Illiterate Heart. Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern UP, 2002. 63-64.
(4) Alexander, M. “Unquiet Borders,” Crab Orchard Review 3.2 (Spring/Summer 1998), Special Issue on Asian American Literature: 2.

The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander (2002)

March 04, 2002

The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander (2002)

Basu, Lopamudra. “The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander.” Social Text 20.3 (Fall 2002) 31-39.

Abstract

Presents an interview with poet Meena Alexander on the events and aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. Discussion of military retaliation and racial profiling of immigrants and international students; Impact of antiwar efforts on artistic creation and critical dissent; Reference to the poem ‘Illiterate Heart.’

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