Fault Lines

This memoir opens with Meena Alexander, a poet and scholar born in India and living in Manhattan, asking how a woman "cracked by multiple migrations" might see herself whole. She lists the cities she has inhabited: Allahabad, Tiruvella, Khartoum, Nottingham, New York, and the languages compacted in her brain: Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, French, and English. Looking up "fault" in the dictionary, she finds definitions of dislocation and breakage, fragments of rock "mashed and jumbled together," and claims the metaphor as her own.

Alexander traces her family in Travancore, a princely state in Kerala on India's southwestern coast. Her maternal grandfather, Kuruchiethu Kuruvilla, whom she calls Ilya, was a theologian in the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, one of India's oldest Christian communities. Her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, known as grandmother Kunju, defied convention by refusing an early arranged marriage, earning a master's degree in English, and campaigning against untouchability, a caste practice that excluded certain groups from public life. Kunju became the first female member of the Travancore Legislative Assembly but died suddenly in 1944, seven years before Alexander's birth. Alexander's mother, Mary, known as amma, was Kunju's only child; her marriage to George Alexander, known as appa, was arranged, and she saw him just once before the wedding.

Alexander, the eldest of three daughters, was born on February 17, 1951, in Allahabad. The emotional center of her early life is the Tiruvella house Ilya built, with its whitewashed walls and sprawling garden. There Ilya invented stories of Susikali, a magical girl-child who chased rakshasis, or demon women, through paddy fields, and led Alexander through the garden's sensory world. She absorbed his teachings about love and equality even as she sensed their contradiction with Kerala's feudal realities: at the Kozencheri house, her paternal grandmother Mariamma scolded her for being too dark-skinned.

In 1956, appa was transferred to the newly independent Republic of Sudan. Alexander and amma sailed from Bombay to Port Sudan; parting from Ilya at the train station became her "trope of loss" (63), repeated across 13 years between Khartoum and Kerala. At seven, during a Kerala summer, she encountered a girl sitting near the railway tracks, her cheeks filled with pebbles. Her nursemaid Chinna called the girl perachathe, or shameless, a word charged with what women must never be. The stone-eating girl becomes an enduring inner icon in the memoir, appearing whenever Alexander faces difficulty.

Ilya's death when Alexander was 11 shattered her world. As he lay dying, she turned away when he asked for water; her four-year-old sister Anna brought the glass instead. When Ilya died, Alexander lost all faith in God and refused to attend the funeral. She writes that she felt she must "refuse life, become a stone, a hard unmoving thing" (89).

Alexander's adolescence in Khartoum unfolded between competing pressures. At Khartoum University, which she entered at 13, she joined student demonstrations against General Abboud's military dictatorship and began writing poetry in secret. Amma held up arranged marriage as the only proper path, and Alexander's journals recorded her anguish: "If you want me to live as a woman, why educate me?" (102). English, acquired painfully as a colonial language, became both the instrument of her alienation and the medium of her literary creation; she found in the lyric poem "a translation out of the boundaries of the actual" (121).

At 18, Alexander left for Nottingham University to pursue a doctorate on Romantic poetry. At 19, overwhelmed by academic pressure and the erasure of her identity, she experienced a mental health crisis: English alphabets twisted into Malayalam shapes and she could not read. Recovery came slowly; one afternoon she opened Wordsworth's The Prelude and found her eyesight restored. She returned to India in 1973, taught in Delhi and Hyderabad, and joined protest marches during the Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties. In 1979 she met David Lelyveld, an American historian of India. They married in a small courthouse ceremony with no family present, and that September, five months pregnant and sick with malaria, Alexander arrived in America.

The early years in New York were disorienting: 11 moves, her son Adam born in 1980, a white man yelling a racial slur at her on the street. Her daughter Svati Mariam was born in 1986. Alexander describes her Manhattan life as a transit lounge existence, standing frozen on Broadway: "I look down and see the trees, way over there, beyond Saint Luke's Hospital and I wonder to myself, Where am I? When am I?" (176). Part I closes with a return to Tiruvella after appa nearly died from a heart attack. Alexander coaxed amma to recount her 1947 wedding and was shocked to learn amma had sold the manthrakodi, the gold brocade garment worn by brides. At night Alexander knelt by the incense tree Ilya had planted, tasted raw earth, and found a momentary peace.

Part II, "Book of Childhood," begun after September 11, 2001, and completed in Tiruvella, opens with a stark announcement: What follows tells of "trauma and memory, childhood and its forgotten past." Alexander states her aim is to deepen Part I, "even to the point of overturning one of the most cherished figures I created" (229). The revelation emerges through therapy in the late 1990s. While working on Mary Shelley's Mathilda, a novella about a father's incestuous desire for his daughter, Alexander experienced inexplicable symptoms: footsteps behind her, cold sweats, the sensation that her hands were about to be cut off. Details of sexual abuse by Ilya surfaced in flashes: the library with its theology books, the teak desk where he made her lie down, the white wall against which she pressed herself. She describes her childhood self walking into his library in a white dress and walking out with eyes like "burnt holes for the sun to shine through" (301). She recognizes that her portrait of Ilya in Part I, depicting them as "almost as one flesh, as indivisible" (247), masked a truth she could not yet bear. Her father, the one person who would have believed her, was dying when these memories surfaced; she decided not to tell him, and appa died in August 1998.

Into this excavation, September 11 erupted. Alexander watched the towers collapse on television and waited for Svati to walk home from the Bronx High School of Science. Svati reported that a classmate had asked if she was Middle Eastern and told her mother, "My skin was screaming at me, Mama" (286). Alexander wrote elegies and a poem in which she describes secretly changing into her sari in a university bathroom, afraid to wear it on the street.

The memoir's final chapters return to the stone-eating girl, now grown, crouching near the ruins. In the ritual cleansing 40 days after Ilya's burial, Alexander entered his empty library, found grandmother Kunju's handwritten note, and composed what she calls a dictionary of desire: the words Girl, Book, Stone, Tree in English, Malayalam, Arabic, and French. The memoir closes with the legend of the Rani, or queen, of Kodamangalam, a warrior-poet whose sari, inscribed with the names of saints, burned into her skin as she passed through fire. The indigo letters became indelible but illegible, and Alexander claims this illegibility as "the fate of those who have passed through fire and children who have been hurt beyond visible measure" (323). Her final words connect writing to the broken shadow work dress of her childhood, a garment whose silk butterflies, embroidered on the fabric's underside, were visible only as shadows beneath the surface.