Re-Visioning Memoirs Old and New: A Conversation with Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander is a poet, novelist, scholar, and memoirist whose writing has been published in translation in numerous languages. Born in Allahabad, India in 1951, she spent her childhood traveling between India and Sudan and, at age twenty-two, received her Ph.D. in British Romantic literature at Nottingham University, England. She married her Jewish American husband, historian David Lelyveld, and moved to the U.S. at age twenty-nine. She has lived in Manhattan for most of her nearly three decades in the U.S., and is Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She is a 2008 fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, working on a new book of poetry.

Alexander’s published works include: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979); Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989); Nampally Road: A Novel (1991); Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993; revised and expanded 2003), which was one of the Publishers Weekly Best Books of 1993; The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); Manhattan Music: A Novel (1997); Illiterate Heart (2002), winner of the PEN Open Book Award; Raw Silk (2004); and Indian Love Poems (2005). Her latest volume of poetry Quickly Changing River (2008) was published earlier this year.

Alexander has written, in multiple genres, about her intensely personal anguish, her life-long search for homelands; she expresses a keen sense of trying to feel at home in the universe. Ten years after the initial publication of her award-winning memoir Fault Lines, Alexander added a significant new section to her memoir. Having witnessed the public and private upheavals caused by the events of 9/11/01 in Manhattan, she recalled repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her grandfather, whom she had idealized in the first edition of her memoir.²

In this interview with Lavina D. Shankar, conducted after Meena Alexander had given poetry readings and had met with several classes at Bates College, Meena discusses the two editions of her memoir, mother–daughter and father–daughter relationships in her poetry, the process of making art, and her relationship to feminism and to Emily Dickinson’s and Virginia Woolf’s writings.

Lavina Shankar: We have met with three classes and had a lovely poetry reading yesterday. So, thank you very much for coming and for agreeing to the interview. Maybe you want to start with what we were talking about at the very end, which was the two editions of Fault Lines, or how you decided not to bring out a separate book. And especially that scene you left out at the beginning of the second edition that situates you in Manhattan in a café talking to Florence [Howe of the Feminist Press] and then calling Roshni [Rustomji-Kerns]. I remember telling my students, “Oh you don’t know who these people are but I know who they are,” so there is a context which is not there in the second edition. Was that a conscious choice?

Meena Alexander: Yes, yes. I think your student put it rather well; I said to him, “Why do you think I left out that first bit, that preamble?” and he said, “Well because I think it’s now more introspective,” and I said, “You’re absolutely right.” I think when I wrote the earlier edition, I was sort of cranking myself up, I was trying to get started, and in order to start I needed a context, I needed a mooring, I needed a kind of anchorage of talking to someone. I very often have that need to talk to someone, to address someone.

And I remember we had also spoken earlier about it and I think you asked, “Do you write for an audience?” and I said, I think that there is a part of the self that becomes the audience, that listens, and that to have too strong an idea of audience would be to censor oneself and to render the writing suspect in some fashion because one would be stopping oneself. You know, “I want...