Dislocated Identities in Migration & History
Poetry in a Time of War: Meena Alexander
This week in my series of slow readings of poetry in our time of war, I introduce you - and myself - to the poet, Meena Alexander (1951-2018).
While war again darkens the skies, we are all asking ourselves the question Alexander posed at the start of her Poetics of Dislocation:
I would like to think about poetry, migration, and trauma, about memory and how it flashes up for us in the face of danger, about the work of the imagination and how it allows us to dwell in the world. What does it mean to belong in a violent world?
Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation
That question flashed with incandescent danger in West Asia this week. People fled bombarded homes and sought refuge among insecure neighbours. The diasporas of West Asia and the dislocated identities of the world - and that means all of us - asked that question again.
What does it mean to belong in a violent world?
—Meena Alexander
Where can you find refuge in this world of war when home is lost to you?
Meena Alexander was a writer with dislocated, migrant, post-colonial identities. Her story has an uncanny resonance with the themes of my decolonisation series. She was born in the northern Indian city of Allahabad into a Syriac Christian family, and then moved as a child to the southwestern coastal state Kerala, now Keralam. There she learned her first language, Malayalam and absorbed cosmopolitan, diverse culture of Kerala, as discussed in my essay on decolonisation in India.
In 1956, Alexander’s family moved to Sudan as a result of the Bandung Conference of 1955. The Indian government appointed Alexander’s father to work as a technical adviser to the newly independent Sudan. There she learned Arabic and French, and completed her language and literature studies at the University of Khartoum. In the 1970s she moved between Sudan, India, Britain and France before, in 1979 Alexander immigrated to New York City, where she remained for the rest of her life.
As is the American way, Google now claims her as an “Indian-American poet”. But such a label cannot capture the subtle weaving of affiliations across time and place in her identity. Perhaps it is time we abandon the appropriation of our plural identities to nations or civilizations of any kind?
Contemporary writing exists in a vital mesh of filiation. The international movements of migration and settlement, as well as the existence of internal exiles, those who feel displaced as minorities within their own land, have created a pulsing, throbbing net of meanings within which the poet can exist, within which she tries to make sense. What becomes of the past, in such an existence, and what of traumatic awareness with its abrupt flashing up of sense?
—Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation
As I know, there are many ways to be harassed into the existence of an internal exile. But surely colonisation, war, socially repressive violence and migration are the most painful ways. They leave the deepest scars.
Alexander wrote of migration, trauma, multiple dislocated identities, and the search for a home in which they could be reconciled. If history rips identities from place, through our ceaseless migrations, can poetry reconcile the wanderer to the pain in memory?
In Poetics of Dislocation, she wrote of the way she found to live in a violent world: by practising the weaving of writing. To protect the body and soul from the winds of migration with the cloth woven from history, memory and langauges. “Can one find a home in language? She asked. “I feel so. At least, that is what I have tried to do.”
But writing is not the only way, and Alexander’s empathy extends more broadly to the many forms of suffering dislocated identities. In her Poetics of Dislocation she wrote:
How shall we move into a truly shared world, reimagine ethnicities, even as we acknowledge violent edges, harsh borders? These children in Manhattan, the Muslim women raped in Surat, the Hindu women stoned in Jersey City, coexist in time. Cleft by space, they forge part of the fluid diasporic world in which I must live and move and have my being.
Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation
Alexander is regarded as one of the finest poets of the Indian transnational diaspora. But in a way is not that the condition of most of us today? Are we not all a diaspora from somewhere? And, if so, then surely nationalism - or even the grand fictions of civilizational identities - cannot be the solution to pains we experience as a result of our dislocated identities.
Alexander sought some solace and inspiration in India’s Bhakti movement was a significant religious movement in Hinduism and South Asia between the 6th and 17th centuries CE. Bhakti is usually translated as “devotion,” and he movement sought to bring religious reforms to all strata of society by adopting a method of “direct divine encounter, experienced in the lives of individual people.” The movement welcomed believers irrespective of caste, gender, or religion.
Poetry played a key role in this practice of love, sharing, worship, and devotion. The movement was inspired by poet-saints, who feature in Alexander’s poetry, including Mirabai (c. 1498- 1565), Akkamahadevi (c. 1130-1160), and Kabir (1440-1518). It was a loosely institutionalised social reformation in Hinduism, that never congealed into a rigid religion or fixed identity of a rebellion or social reform movement.
I wonder as I read about this movement whether we should draw inspiration in our own world of violence from such rhizomatic movements, rather than the stone towers of nations, systemic politics and civilization states?
Slow Reading of Krishna, 3:29 AM
Alexander was a secular writer inspired by this movement of devotion, and its applicability in another place and another time.
In the poem, I am reading today, a personalised, secularised vision of the Hindu deity Krishna appears.
Krishna, 3:29 AM was, in fact, Alexander’s final poem. She wrote it in the last month of her life as she was dying of cancer.
Manav Ratti, presents the crisis from which this poem springs:
With this heightened awareness of the fragility of her life and her mortality, it is unsurprising that Alexander turned to Krishna as a symbol of life, rebirth, and regeneration. This poem is post-secular in its search for faith and in its affirmations (such as of storytelling and poetry), while both evoking and secularizing a Hindu deity, Krishna. We could also see this final poem as a kind of mysticism, as a death-bed vision and darshan of Krishna, both humanized and transcendentalized; in Hinduism, darshan [दर्शन] is the act of seeing a deity as a form of spiritual realization, with the deity in turn beholding the seer, the two entering a sharing and exchange.
Ratti, “A Postsecular Poetics of Dislocation: Secularism and Religion in the Indian-American Poetry of Meena Alexander” (2021)
Please listen to Meena Alexander, Krishna, 3:29 AM.
I hope this reading leads you to read more of Meena Alexander’s poetry and to reflect on the fluid, violent, diasporic world we could share.
Meena Alexander wrote “We have poetry / So we do not die of history” (Question Time).
But I think we have history so we do not die of the stoned identities that our nations, states, civilizations and political fanatics call us to.
You can find consolation in any of my 100 poems to read aloud in times of war here:
Thanks for reading
🙏❤️🌎
Jeff