Salem Press

American Ethnic Writers
Meena Alexander

Born: Allahabad, India; February 17, 1951

South Asian American

Alexander's work examines women in society from the perspective of an expatriate feminist.

Principal works
poetry: The Bird's Bright Ring: A Long Poem, 1976; I Root My Name, 1977; Without Place, 1978; Stone Roots, 1980; The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, 1989; Night-Scene, the Garden, 1992; River and Bridge, 1995; Illiterate Heart, 2002; Raw Silk, 2004

long fiction: Nampally Road, 1991; Manhattan Music, 1997

nonfiction: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism, 1979; Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley, 1989; Fault Lines: A Memoir, 1993; The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, 1996

edited text: Indian Love Poems, 2005

miscellaneous: House of a Thousand Doors: Poems and Prose Pieces, 1988

Meena Alexander (MEE-nah al-ehks-ZAN-dur) spent her early life in Kerala, a state at the southwestern tip of India. She received her English education in the Sudan, traveling between her parents' home in Africa and her grandparents' home in India. She received her bachelor's degree in 1969 from the University of Khartoum and a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in 1973. After teaching at universities in Delhi and Hyderabad, she moved to New York City in 1979. By that time she had already published three volumes of poetry; many more, along with literary studies and works in other genres, would follow.

Alexander describes herself as a "woman cracked by multiple migrations," acted on by the disparate and powerful influences of the languages and customs of the four continents on which she has lived. Although her works are written in English, she grew up speaking Malayalam, a Dravidian language of southwest India, and Arabic, the language of her Syrian Christian heritage, spoken in North Africa. Her writing reflects the tension created by the interplay of these influences and serves as a way to derive meaning from her wide range of experience.

The most prominent theme of Alexander's work is the difficulty inherent in being a woman, of having a woman's body and coping with the societal, physiological, and personal pressures on and responses to that body as it develops through childhood into maturity and middle age. Her grandmothers serve as mythical figures with whom Alexander closely identifies. Her perspective is further complicated by her alienation from the language and culture of her childhood, and by her need to recover something of that past. The images of fecundity and beauty with which Alexander's work is suffused derive from her youth in Kerala; these images may be juxtaposed with images of infirmity, sterility, or brutality, underscoring the writer's need to integrate the fragmented components of her life as an expatriate woman. The imagination provides a synthesis of the elements of history and personality in Alexander's work. Her poems "begin as a disturbance, a jostling in the soul" which prompts her to write, seeking "that fortuitous, fleeting meaning, so precious, so scanty."

House of a Thousand Doors
Type of work: Poetry
First published: 1988
House of a Thousand Doors is a collection of fifty-nine poems and prose pieces that reflect Alexander's multicultural heritage and the tension it creates. The book is organized into three sections, the first and third sections serving as a synthesis for the wide variety of subjects and themes treated in the body of the work. Many of the poems reflect the writer's subjective response to her experience; many also project or create new experiences that underscore the importance of imagination as a lens through which to focus the inner life into poetry.

The title poem of House of a Thousand Doors uses the title metaphor to describe the variety of forces that operate on the persona: gender, heritage, language, experience, ideology, and the search for meaning. A complex array of images embodies these forces in the book, reflecting the author's sensitivity to their influence. Alexander uses her writing to integrate the diversity of her experience.

Dominating the persona's early life is the figure of her grandmother, a powerful member of the family who learned to exercise some control over the many lines of force that affected her life. The mature awareness of the persona is imposed on the re-created memory of herself as a girl watching the figure of the grandmother kneel in turn before each of the thousand doors on a never-ending pilgrimage, "a poor forked thing" praying for the favor of her ancestors. The grandmother becomes a figure of myth and a symbol of tradition serving as the focus of many of the poems in the collection. Conciliation and unity with the culture and solidity of the past are central to House of a Thousand Doors.

The three major sources of imagery in the book are family, culture, and nature. Family images, though literal, have a universal quality--she describes finding her grandmother's letters "in an old biscuit box" and wonders if her grandmother was, like herself, "inventing a great deal." Other images reflect the diminution of women at the behest of a patriarchal society; a cell door closing on a woman raped by the police clangs "like an old bell left over by the British," while a portrait of the pacifist leader Mohandas Gandhi looks down from the wall. A third class of imagery, the imagery of nature, reflects the persona's romantic theory of art; she laments, "My body/ part water/ part rock/ is searching for heaven." This searching brings her back to her past, real and mythical, and ultimately back to herself and her need for meaning.

Suggested Readings
Dave, Shilpa. "The Doors to Home and History: Post-colonial Identities in Meena Alexander and Bharati Mukherjee." Amerasia Journal 19 (Fall, 1993): 103.

Perry, John Oliver. Review of Nampally Road, by Meena Alexander. World Literature Today 65 (Spring, 1991): 364.

Andrew B. Preslar