Shin, Eunice
Period 06
01/08/02
Alexander: Fault Lines
As Meena Alexander sees her life as a parcel of shards which have their own identities and implore to be recognized as distinct, she introspects into her fractured condition and finds no solace from the unceasing and permanent enumeration of various cultures, languages, and locals which serve to be the “faults” and defects of her selfhood.
Alexander, using figurative language, writes of the multitude of distinct identities to create a structure that overwhelms the reader. She quickly blurts out the diverse locations she has been to, trying to elucidate her presence in the traditional life at Tiruvella and also in the bustling, modernistic community of Manhattan. The exotic languages of Malayalam and Hindi clash with the mundane ones of English and French. There is a parallelism in this rapid, almost callous way of listing, but evidently the paradox lurks as it reveals itself in the manifest disparities of Alexander’s make-up. She used rhetorical questions and deliberates, “How should I spell out these fragments of a broken geography?” She has been uprooted so many a time that she is lost and cannot connect the dislocations of her journeys. “And what of all the languages compacted in my brain?” The word usage of “compacted” seems to represent a forced action, as if Alexander was compelled to learn the different tongues and honor the story of the faultless life she should emulate in finding a respectable husband and in the end swallow her own ending.
