CHAPTER III

Diasporic sensibility in the

poetry of Meena Alexander
and Sujata Bhatt

Meena Alexander Sujata Bhatt

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 CHAPTER - 3
Diasporic sensibility in the poetry of Meena Alexander and
Sujata Bhatt

"When the time came for her to learn all the knowledge from her past lives
returned to her, as wild geese in autumn to the Ganga River".

- Kalidasa, Kumarsambhava 1:30

"It seems to me that lyric poem is a form of extreme silence, which is

protected from the world. To make a lyric poem I have to enter into a
dream state. But at the same time, almost by virtue of that disconnect, it
becomes a very intense location to reflect the world."

- Meena Alexander. Fault Lines

"Every time I think I’ve forgotten,

I think I've lost the mother tongue,
It blossoms out of my mouth."

-Sujata Bhatt (From Search for My Tongue)

Modern age is the age of prose. As science and technology

advance, poetry seems to be pushed aside. Many people think that poetry is
irrelevant and useless. In the age of information technology, many think that
it has lost its significance. Reports say that poetry is the least read form of
literature and students do not like to study poetry. Teachers do not like to
teach poetry. Those who teach poetry paraphrase it instead of reciting
poetry. This has led to the loss of ear for poetry. Publisher does not like to
publish poetry as there is no market for it. In such a scenario, it is quite
relevant to discuss the role of poetry and its validity. Is science anti-thesis of
poetry? In fact, poetry is a higher science. Science was always considered
a part of philosophy in the earlier times. Galileo, Descartes and Newton
regarded God as ‘the chief mathematician of the universe’. For Einstein also,

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a serious scientist is always a religious man. He advocated that scientist
should never forget man and his fate while working on diagrams and
equations.

Ancient Indian sages were also endowed with scientific spirit. Their
questionings were highly rational and scientific. Later Buddha and Charvaka
also made inquiries that were promoted by reason and scientific spirit. It is a
fact that the best thinking and poetic sensibility went hand in hand in India.
Gandhi's law of non-violence and equal distribution have scientific basis.
Lord Buddha is called not only Buddha the enlightened but also Buddha the
Compassionate. Total man is a fine amalgam of reason and emotions.

Swami Vivekananda saw a very scientific connection between

science and morality. He said that as long as even a single insect lived on
earth, he too lived. He saw and understood the unity of life among all
creatures. Lord Buddha told his disciple Ananda that till a single man
suffered in the world, his search for ‘Nirvana’ was meaningless. In fact, life
contains everything. It refuses to fall into categories and compartments like
science, literature, philosophy and so on. Thoreau did not feel lonely and
exclaimed: 'why should I feel lonely? Is not my planet in the milky way?'
Henry Vaughan too proclaimed with pure delight.

"I saw the eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light".

Sigmund Freud had to admit that it was not he but poets who
discovered the ‘unconscious’. William Wordsworth declared in his poetic
manifesto that, "poetry is the impassioned expression of all sciences".
Science limits itself to physical world while poetry amalgamates desperate
experiences. S.T. Coleridge called it esemplastic function of imagination
that organizes the disparate elements into the whole. Ambiguity is one of the
characteristics of the poetry. It uses words in connotation manner. It uses
images and symbols to represent ideas or feelings. Wallace Stevens, the
famous American poet said that poetry should have certain amount
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ambiguity. Poetry is both pragmatic as well as transcendental. As Mathew
Arnold says, it is a criticism of life and therefore it encompasses everything
that is included in LIFE.

In modern time, poetry has played the role of an instrument of

change. It cannot connive at the realities of life. It must disrobe and
dismantle if necessary. The new poets carry wounds in their hearts. These
are the wounds of the teeming toiling millions. Their hearts bled for those
who suffer, those who are deprived and exploited, those who are alienated
and exiled. Tolstoy believed that art must have communicability. It must
never be the hand maiden of aristocratic tastes.

True poetry rises above the clamour of the chaos, violence and
trivialities of life. It teaches us how to live meaningfully. Albert Camus said
that there is only one philosophical question: whether to commit suicide.
Further he says the point is not live and not to escape from life. Gulzar gives
a time portrait of a poet in the following words:

"Seated on a branch of the mulberry tree

weaving threads of silk
Uncovering each moment
Picking each leaf
A mad man, listens to every breath
unravels each and wraps it around his body
A prisoner of his own breath
This poet of silken sounds will one day die
chocked by his own threads." 1

Poetry is the loftiest form of literature. It is the supreme utterance

that mankind is endowed with. The soul of all arts is enjoyment but it must
be disinterested and lofty transcending the physical and the material world.
However, if this enjoyment loses its touch with life and humanity, it loses its
worth. Man possesses knowledge which leads him to inner freedom, the
freedom of mind and soul. His love for beauty transcends utility. Men as
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well as animals need to express their feelings of pain or pleasures. Man has
a fund of emotional energy which is not all occupied with self preservation.
This surplus finds outlet in the creation of art and human civilization is built
upon this surplus. Rabindranath Tagore in his essay What is Art? remarks,

"The principal object of art, also, being the expression of personality,

and not of that which is abstract and analytical, it necessarily uses the
language of picture and music. This has led to a confusion of our
thought that the object of art is the production of beauty: where as
beauty in art has been the mere instrument and not its complete and
ultimate significance". 2

Mathew Arnold in his famous The Study of Poetry says that poetry is
the religion of the future and more and more people will turn to it for the
understanding of life. Science is complete and even dangerous without
poetry. He prophesied that what now passes as religion and philosophy will
be accepted by poetry. Arnold gives the highest status to poetry when he
remarks,
"The future of poetry is immense because in poetry where it is worthy
of its high destinies, our race, as our time goes on, will find an ever
surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an
accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a
received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has
materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, it has attached its
emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for the poetry, the
idea is everything, the rest is the words of illusion, of divine illusion.
Poetry attaches emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest
part of our religion today in its unconscious poetry" 3

R.W. Emerson, the famous American poet, Philosopher and

transcendentalist puts poets on the highest pedestal. He says that among
the incomplete men, the poet stands as a complete man. He is isolated from
his contemporaries by the virtue of truth and art. All people need to express
themselves and without expression, man is only a half man. Emerson says,
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 "The universe has three children, born at one time which reappear
under different names in every system of thought whether they be
called cause, operation and effect; or more poetically, Jove, Plato,
Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but
which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These
stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good and for
the love of beauty". 4

Emerson calls the poet a Sayer, a namer who represents beauty.

He is sovereign standing erect at the centre. Poetry existed before
everything else. The poet is a beholder of ideas. He is an announcer and
proclaimer of the necessary and the eternal. A true poet is never detached
from life. It is the detachment from life and God that makes things ugly. It is
the task of the poet to reattach things to nature and the whole. He uses
forms according to life and not life according to forms. He does not stop at
facts but employs them as signs. The poet is the Namer and Language
Maker. He names them after their appearances or essence. Language is
fossil poetry. Emerson says:

"Poets are thus liberating gods, Men have really got a new
sense and found within their world another world, or nest of
worlds, for the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does
5
not stop"

Poets are free and they have the capacity of making others free. Their
basic concern is man because man is the Supreme Being among all
creatures. An Indian poet, Chandidas said that man is above all being and
no being ever surpasses him. New poetry also aims at a abolition of the self
to achieve higher self. It destroys the language in order to recreate a
language. To modern man, God is irrelevant because He is now replaced by
man. New poetry is a protest against the predicament of man. Poetry may
not be able to provide cure for social ills but it is not a mere verbal game.
New poets attempt to present human beings, their anguish and alienation
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from their roots. New poetry is an endeavor to discover the true identity of
man. The questions that confront modern man are - To Whom does man
belong? Does he really belong to any place, anything, any anchor? For
whom does he write? Does his writing have any impact on betterment of
humanity?

Poetry aims at seeking the answers to these questions. Man belongs

to the world, the universe and his anchorage lies in his fellowmen. His
ultimate salvation is not in abstract idea of soul but in being a part of the
humankind with all its ordeals, sufferings and struggles. His salvation is not
freedom from the world of sufferings humanity. In fact, it lies in his being
with them and for them. In his very identification with all creatures, he will
find his home, the home that we call ‘Soul or God’. Poetry, above all, is a
door for this understanding and realization. In my research, I have
undertaken the study of poetry of some diasporic women poets who are
highly sensitive to the sufferings of humanity. Their sense of exile is not
personal but universal.

These women poets have been called here ‘Cassandras in exile’

because like Cassandra, they are condemned to speak out but often not
listened to or believed. These women poets belong to South Asian region
who have migrated to other countries and have experienced the sense of
dislocation and displacement from their roots. Meena Alexander, Sujata
Bhatt and Chitra Banerjee Divakarani are Indian women poets who have
lived abroad. Moniza Alvi is a young poet from Pakistan and Jean
Arsanayagam is a Dutch Burgher women poet who has experienced double
exile being a woman married to Tamil and Dutch Burgher in Sinhala
dominated Srilanka.

The myth of Cassandra is well known in Greek literature. It is one of

the saddest tales of ancient classical literature. Cassandra was a princess of
the legendary City of Troy; the daughter of king Priam and Queen Hecuba.
She was so charming that she attracted both gods and mortals alike. Apollo,
the Sun God lusted after Cassandra and to win her, he promised to bestow
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upon her the gift of prophecy. Unable to resist the gift, Apollo offered, she
relented but she was not at all convinced that she wanted to take Apollo as
her lover. Apollo gave her the gift of prophecies and taught her how to use
them. However, once his promise was fulfilled, she backed out and refused
to give her body to Apollo. Furious at being rejected by a mere mortal,
Apollo decided to punish her. He could not take back the gift he had given
her, he could alter it. So he leveled a curse upon her that she would be able
to foresee the future but no one would believe her. On the contrary, they
would call her a liar. The cruelty lay in the fact that she always saw the truth
but could not communicate it.

True to his word, Cassandra could foresee the future but each time,
she tried to warn people in advance, her words were ignored and labeled as
a liar. Her father was now ashamed of her daughter's supposed madness
and pronounced her insane. She was locked inside her own chambers. He
even went to the extent of declaring that she was dead. One of the
Cassandra's most important prophecies involved the fall of Troy at the hands
of the Greeks and the Trojan Horse that caused the downfall of Troy.

Cassandra managed to escape from Troy eluding atrocities of the

Greeks. She hid within the temples of the Goddess Athena who promised to
protect her. However, Ajax found her there clinging helplessly to the statue
of Athena. Ajax forced himself upon her and for this act, he was cursed by
Athena that he would never return home. Ajax died with the crash of his ship
against in the rocks in mighty ocean. Labeled as liar and insane, Cassandra
gave into her fate and accompanied Agamemnon as his concubine. Upon
their return, Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra greeted the couple warmly
embracing Cassandra. However, Cassandra could foresee her own death at
the hands of Clytemnestra alongside Agamemnon.

Cassandra represents the fate of women in male dominated society.

Greek society did not recognize the woman's right to say no. She has been
portrayed as insane as she refused to play by the rules established by
undeserving gods. Cassandra symbolizes an impassioned outburst by the
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woman who feels the terrible burden of her gift of poetic speech. Her
knowledge is apocalyptic, her urgency daemonic. For her, poetry assaults
and afflicts her, setting her off from human kind and rendering her the
doomed and solitary witness of destruction and death. This suggests that
poetry from its hidden source creates speech which is profoundly 'other' and
'opposed' to the received notions of men. In Cassandra, the poet can see
herself who recognizes a culture's ‘tricks of lust and pride’. Cassandra
denigrates the hierarchy of traditional authority and disrupts allegiance to
male gods. Her role is to create the poem as prophecy. The society tries to
paralyze its female poets who through the intensity of their language create
songs like screams. Cassandra's mad screaming voice differs from other
prophets of Greek mythology. It expresses the anguish of a woman and a
poet who foresees impending dangers and death and tries to warm humanity
of these disasters only to be unheeded and ignored.

In fact, poets both men and women suffer like Cassandra. They are
taken as mad and their cries go unheeded. The famous author of The
Mahabharata, Ved Vyas had written that he had been crying out loudly
raising both his hands but people never took him seriously. This is probably
the destiny of all poets, seers and all wise men. The diasporic women poets
of my dissertation are prophetic in the sense that they cry against the evils of
terrorism, racialism, war, ethnic violence and gender discrimination. Like
Cassandra, they say 'no' to easy complacence of our age. They speak out
fearlessly and boldly. These diasporic women poets are displaced from their
Troy and experience the agonies of exile and the loss of language and
communication in one or the other way. Like Cassandra, they denigrate the
hierarchy of traditional authority, the set stereotypes and political and cultural
subordination. They oppose false cultural pretentions of their own countries
and also the racial hegemony of their host countries.

Meena Alexander (1951) is a genuine diasporic voice expressing her

own lived diasporic experiences in her poetry- uprooting and exile, migrant
memories and trauma, separation and loneliness - all the way from India to

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Sudan and USA. Mary Elizabeth Alexander was born in 1951 on February
17. She christened Mary Elizabeth but she has been called "Meena" since
her birth and in her fifteenth year, she officially changed her name to Meena.
It was not a mere act of defiance but of liberation. She writes:

"Mary Elizabeth" I was baptized, the names of my two

grandmothers strung together, anglicized Mariamma and Eli as
befit our existence in the aftermath of colonial era whose English
was all powerful. Fifteen years old in Khartoum, I changed my
name to Meena, what everyone knew me as, but just as
important to me, the name under which I started to write
poems". 6

Her appa was dismayed. He felt that she would be confused in public
records and no one would know who she was. But she felt that in the
change of name, she was her truer self, stripped free of the colonial burden.
In Sanskrit, Meena meant ‘Fish’ and in Urdu, it means ‘enamel work or
jewelling’ and in Arabic, it meant 'port'. Meena's father George Alexander
had a job in the Central Government while her mother was a house wife.
Her maternal grandmother Ilya was a distinguished Keralite. Her
grandmother was a distinguished woman in Kerala who had gained M.A. in
English literature in those days from Presidency College, Madras and joined
YMCA which was quite active in India during the early decades of the 20th
Century.

She had travelled extensively visiting Peking, London and other

places. She was married at the age of twenty eight to a Nationalist and a
follower of 'Mahatma Gandhi'. After her marriage, she diverted her energy to
work for freedom of women, children's education and social work. She was
quite active in removal of untouchability in the early years of 1930's.
Mahatma Gandhi had visited their house in Kottayam in 1934. Meena had
two sisters Anna and Elsa both younger to her. Meena's early childhood was
spent in Allahabad and Tiruvella. Meena says that though she was born in
Allahabad, it was not her home. Tiruvella, her mother's home and
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Kozencheri, her appa's home together composed her nadu, the dark soil of
self. Nadu in Malayalam is a word for home and homeland.

In 1956, the Sudan gained independence and asked the Third world
countries for assistance in establishing its government and administrative set
up. Meena's father applied for a job with the Sudanese Government and he
was selected for the job. The family moved to Khartoum where Meena spent
her childhood years and days of youth between five to eighteen. However,
the family used to visit Kerala each summer. Her journey to Sudan was the
first ocean crossing which she felt could be described as figuration of death,
of loss of sense and being blotted out. The sands of the Sahara swept into
Khartoum city. This was her first shock of transition. She received her
degree from Khartoum University and they moved to England to study at
Nottingham University where she earned her Ph.D.

She returned to India where she worked at Delhi University, Central

Institute of Hyderabad and Hyderabad University. It was in Hyderabad she
met her husband David Lelyveld. In 1979, they moved to New York City
where they live with their two children Adam Kuruvilla Lelyveld (b.1980) and
Swati Mariam Lelyveld (b.1986) Meena Alexander’s husband David Lelyveld,
a Jewish scholar in a history of India and South Asia. Meena Alexander
teaches at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center, City University of
New York.

Meena Alexander began her literacy career at the tender age of ten
when she started writing poetry. Her first book, a single lengthy poem The
Bird's Bright Wing (1976) was published in Calcutta. She is better known as
poet but she has attempted other genres of literature also. Her works
include:
1. The Bird's Bright Wing (1976)
2. Without Place (1978)
3. I Root my Name (1977)
4. Stone Roots (1980)
5. The Storm (1989)
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 6. The Night Scene, the Garden (1989)
7. House of Thousand Doors (1988)
8. River and Bridge (1996)
9. Manhattan Music (1977) (A novel)
10. Nampally Road (1991) (A Novel)
11. Fault Lines (A Memoir) (1993 & 2003)
12. The Shock of Arrival: Reflection on postcolonial Experience: A
study on Romanticism (1996)
13. Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy
Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989)
14. Illiterate Heart (2002)
15. Raw Silk (2004)

Meena Alexander's poems and prose writings have been widely

published in magazines in the USA, UK and India. Some of her poems and
prose writings have been translated into Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, French,
Italian, Spanish and German. Meena Alexander is an internationally
acclaimed poet. She truly represents the history of global culture. She
expresses her first hand experiences of how it looks and feels to have a split
identity. Most of her writing explores themes of migrant, displacement, exile,
multiple, identities and allegiances. Some of these themes are introduced in
her early works of poetry - The Bird's Bright Wing (1976), Without Place
(1978), I root my Name (1977) and Stone Roots (1980). These themes
continue to appear in her subsequent works also. As the title of many of her
books reveal, her major preoccupation is the reason for roots through
evocation of local landscapes, events, persons, family members and events.
In her later collections of poems, she deals with the issues of defining a
strong female self especially through matrilineal memories. Her grandfather
Ilya, her grandmother and their house in Tiruvella dominate her memories.
Ilya was a sort of intellectual social reformer who was quite close to E.M.S.
Nambudripad. Her grandmother Kunjn was also a powerful woman, highly
educated Christian who adored Gandhian values. She was quite liberal
minded and worked for women's liberation through education.
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 Meena Alexander recalls her:

"I was filled with longing for an ancestral figure who would allow
my mouth to open, permit me to speak. I skipped a whole ring of
life and made up a grandmother figure, part ghost, part flesh.
She was drawn over what I had learnt of grandmother Kunju.
Imagined her: a sensitive, cultured woman; a woman who had a
tradition, and a history - precisely what I lacked; a woman who
had lived to witness the birth pangs of a Nation” 7

Meena had never known her as she had died and untimely death. She
was like a Sapphire to her buried in a strip of earth or the shifting aureole of
pollen on a Champak flower' .She had gleaned facts and events of her life
from Ilya and other family members. She was quite close to Ilya who
narrated the stories from the Bible and the Mahabharata. She says that it
was he who nourished her intellectually and emotionally. He instilled into her
a restless idealism that the earth could be transformed and the world could
become a place of peace, love and happiness.

Meena saw her grandmother's face through Ilya's eyes. Recalling the
tragic death of her dear Ilya, Meena Alexander writes:

"Had Ilya lived longer, I might have outgrown that world, like a
skin that no longer fit, like a garment that was to tight. But as it
was, the torment of his death plunged us into grief and rage. I
think neither amma nor I have ever gotten over it. With the death
and duties and loss of cardamom and rubber estates, our lives
changed. A whole world shivered and cracked. The hoarse
sounds of his last breathing, the rattle in his throat as died, filled
my ears." 8

Ilya had told Meena about partition of India and the tragic holocaust
that took place then. He said that it was good the she was born after those
terrible days. He also described to her Gandhiji's fast unto death to stop

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violence that took place during the partition. Ilya said that he too fasted on
some days and wore Khadi, a hand spun and hand woven cloth made by
ordinary hands. All such childhood incidents nourished and shaped Meena
Alexander's poetic sensibilities. She has recorded all these memories in her
memoir Fault Lines (2003). Her memoir helps us in understanding he works
better, which are marked by the sense of loss, the pain of exile and
dislocation.

In House of Thousand Doors (1988) is a collection of poetry mixed with

imaginary letters to her grandmother and mother and short lyrical prose
pieces. Meena Alexander tries to seek her identity through the figures of her
maternal grandmother Kunju who defied the dictates of conventional
feminine behavior and became and influential political activist. Her poems
are often personal as well as political as in 'Art of Pariahs' from River and
Bridge (1996). In this poem, she deals with the issue of racial tensions in the
United States:

"Back against the kitchen store Draupadi sings;

In my head Beirut still burns-
The unseen of Nubia, God's upper kingdom the Rani of Jhansi,
transfigured, raising her sword are players too. They have entered with
me to North America and share these walls'. 9

Meena Alexander is one of the foremost diasporic poets today. Her

writing is lyrical, pageant and sensual, dealing with large themes including
ethnic intolerance, terrorism, fanaticism and interracial tensions. Her poems
are intensely self conscious and with minimum of words, she evokes layers
of meaning. For her, poetry has important role to play in modern violence
ridden world. She says in an interview with Ruth Maxey in Kenyon Review:

“In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some ways to

reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of
tenderness and grace with which to exist.”10

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 As child, Meena wanted to be a circus performer after she had seen
circus artists doing balancing acts in Gemini Circus. Then her grandfather
and mother wanted her to be a medical doctor and her father who was a
scientist encouraged her to be a physicist. However, Meena turned to poetry
at the age of eleven or twelve. For her, it was the music of survival. She
admits that there is an inner voice that speaks to her. She feels that there is
a girl child that resides inside her and she refuses to die. She writes in a
chapter titled Lyric in a time of Violence in Fault Lines:

"It seems to me that the lyric poem is a form of extreme silence, which
is protected from the world. To make a lyric poem, I have to enter into
a dream state. But at the same time, almost by virtue of that
disconnect, it becomes a very intense location to reflect on the
world."11

Meena Alexander poetry is marked by diasporic sensibility which finds

highly emotion, charge expression in sensual, lyrical and metaphoric
language. She has undergone multiple identities in multiple places. Her
poems express her own lived experiences-uprooting and exile, migrant
memories traveling to different places in India, Sudan and America. She has
lived in different cities and towns like Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune,
Khartoum, London, New York, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Trivandrum etc. In
her memoir Fault Lines she writes about ethnicity and writing of poetry. The
whole chapter Real Places or How Sense Fragments: Thoughts on Ethnicity
and Writing of Poetry is a manifesto of her relationship with poetry. She asks
herself: who am I? Where am I? When am I? These are the questions all
diasporic writers are required to mix amidst violent densities of place. In
modern times, world overlap and one has co-existed in fluid diasporic world.
The biggest challenge for a creative writing is to make a real integration
between one's personal history and the experience in alien countries.

Meena Alexander asks:

12
“What does it mean to carry one's house on one's back"?

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 In America, she has to explain herself all the time, her origin, her
occupation and so on. As a poet, she has to explain whether she is a poet
writing in America. If she is, is she an American poet like Robert Frost or
Wallace Stevens? or is she an Asian-American poet. She feels that
everything that comes to her is hyphenated and incomplete. She says that
she is a women poet, a women poet of color, a south Indian Woman poet
who makes up lines in English a past colonial language as she waits for the
red lights to change on Broadway. 13

The multicultural world in America has been described very poignantly

in her poem News of the World.

“We must always return

to poems for new of the world
or polish for the lack
Strip it
block it with blood
the page is not enough
unless the sun rises in it
Old doctor wilily writes
crouched on a stop
in Paterson, New Jersey
I am torn by light
She cries into her own head
The players fields of death
are far from me. In Cambodia I carried
my mother's head in a sack
and ran three days and nights
through a rice field
Now I pick up vegetables
from old sacking and straighten
them on crates: tomatoes
burning plums, cabbages hard

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 as bone. I work in Manhattan.
The subway corrupts me
with crates the robed Muslims sell
with white magazines
with spittle and gum
I get lost underground
By onkee stadium
I stumble out
hands loaded down
fists clenched into balls
A man approaches
much on his shirt
his head, a battering ram he knows who I am
I stall:
the tracks flash
14
with a thousand suns

Meena Alexander says that Frantz Fanon speaks of the barbed wire
that exists in a colonized state. She believes that this "zone of occult
instability” must be expressed in poetry of the diaspora which will act as a
process of decolonization. The Asian Americans grapple with violence,
disorder and injustice and they are bartered in capitalist society of the West.
Wallace Stevens said somewhere that imagination is a form of violence from
within that presses against the actual, the violence from without. Meena
Alexander says that in America, the diasporic poets and artists press against
the barbed wire of the racialism.
Meena Alexander says that people call poets 'the creators of that small
despised art". As a poet, she picks up strands of memories and evokes
them all. She feels that her ethnicity demands it. Past memories haunt her.
In India, everything is colored with hierarchy, authority, and traditions. No
one feels its burden. Only in America, she read about the pain of the post
colonial heritage and the sufferings of women in India she says:

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 "There is a violence in the very language,
American English, that we have to face, even
as we work to make it ours, decolonize
it so that it will express the truth of
bodies beaten and banned. After all, for
such as we are the territories are not free.
The world is not open. That endless
space the emptiness of the American
sublime to worse than a lie. It
does ceaseless damages to the imagination.
But it has taken me ten years in this
country even to get to think it .” 15

In America, she came face to face with subtle form of racism and
violence. She felt that true poetry must figure out this violence and give
expression to it. For a writer, there are many kinds of death for example the
loss of one's language or the forgetfulness of the body. In her collection of
poems House of a Thousand Doors, the past took the form of an ancestor, a
grandmother figure. She wanted to tear herself free from the past but it
sucked her back in its vortex. Meena Alexander says that her ethnicity as an
Indian American and in broader sense, an Asian American requires her to
hold on to past resisting fracturing. For her, poetry has a higher role to play.
She writes:
"The struggle for social justice, for human
dignity, is for each of us. Like ethnicity,
like the labor of poetry, it is larger
than any single person, or any single
voice. It transcends individualism.
It is shape by forces that well up
out of us, chaotic, immensely
powerful forces that disorder the brittle
boundary lines we create, turn us
towards a light, a truth, whose immensity,
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 far from being mystical-in the sense
of a pure thing far away, a distance
shining - casts all our actions into
16
relief, etches out lines into art.”

River and Bridge (1996) contains poems that express nostalgia for
homeland, memories of childhood and also monotonous life of a migrant in
the USA. In a poem Softly My Soul, the poet describes the American Milieu:

"Softly my Soul, softly my soul o so softly

the herons have fled, but the planes keep coming.
Above Liberty's torch the sky is pink
And George Washington would laugh in his sleep
to mark the gazelles on Fifth Avenue
tiny miniskirts hoisted to their thighs." 17

In Everything strikes Loose, the poet laments over the bygone when
there was 'grace in the young poet's mind, leaves flickered in the golden
Pamba river.
"Now the river trickles
through low hills
it tastes of childhood
the boats fly no flags
the races are all done
and flat barges driven by men
bear cinnamon, cloves, dried pepper” 18

Women poet face double burden of the diasporic destiny. They face
hostile racialism and displacement in alien countries and at the same time
they suffer at the hands of patriarchal society. In addition to these, women
poets also face the borders that their bodies create- racial as well as sexual
borders. As a teenager in Khartoum, Meena kept journals that contained
quotes from Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Wallace Stevens and her own
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poetry. Her mother insisted that women should accept the limitations
imposed by their bodies and honour their femininity. Arranged marriage was
a narrow gate that all women had to enter and learn certain skills required to
run a household. In Kozencheri, girls could not get out without proper
escorts. They were often molested in market places of Kerala. Meena had
heard that sometimes women committed suicide to do away with their
shameful bodies. These terrible images haunted her mind in her childhood.
In her poem Passion, she poignantly describes the life of a woman:
“I am she
the women after giving birth

life
to give life
torn and hovering

as bloodied fluids
baste the weakened flesh

For her
there are no words
no bronze, no summoning.

I am she
smeared with ash
from the black God's altar

I am
the sting of love
the blood hot flute
the face
carved in the window,
watching as the god set sail
across the waters
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 risen from the cape
Sri Krishna in a painted Catamaran.

I am she
tongue less in rhapsody
the stars of glass
nailed to the southern sky

Ai ai

She cries

They stuffed
her mouth with rags

and pulled her

from the wooden bed

and thrust her

to the broken floor.

I,I.19

River and Bridge, the title poem of the collection portrays the pain of
crossing borders. The poet describes her new life in New York in a
landscape of mist and burnished trees she says:
“But Homer knew it and Vyasa too; black river and bridge summon
these whose stinging eyes crises cross red lights, metal implements,
battlefields: birth is always bloody". 20

In a poem Muse, Meena Alexander laments the ruin of 'our

language' and the sense of having 'no home'. She says:

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 "Our language is in ruins
vowels impossibly sharp
broken consonants of bone
She has no home". 21

Muse (2) is a poem in sequel to the former poem in which she

continues with the same theme. She says:
"creatures of here and there
we keep scurrying
Madurai, Manhattan, who cares?

When she turns it is etched on her:

Words, sentences, maps,
her skin burns bright;

22
Sheer aftermath".

Meena Alexander has written several poems on the burden of

English and illiteracy in one's own language. In fact, she knew several
language Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, French, and English but she always felt
that English had alienated her from what she was born to; the language of
intimacy. When she was working at the Central Institute of English at
Hyderabad, there were lots of discussion and debate about the status of
English in India. It was argued that English was superior to any other Indian
language as it could be a powerful medium for technical knowledge and
modern science and commerce.

However, everyone felt that the future of English depends upon its
ability to the needs of the masses in India. From Susie Tharu who had been
her close friend, Meena Alexander learnt about the strength of femaleness,
resistance and possibility of political activism. Jayanth Mahapatra, the
famous Indian English poet from Orissa taught her to understand the poet's
bond with place and how to accept the ravages of time. She always felt that

Page 124
colonialism was quite intrinsic to the burden of English in India. She too felt
that she was robbed of literacy in her own mother tongue. She feels that
multiple speeches surround her making her dream of barbed wire. In her
poem Night Scene, the Garden, she talks of "ferocious alphabets of flesh",
the burden of female body. There are images of blasted terrain of the West
Banks, bombed out streets of Aden, the ravaged hill sides of Sri Lanka and
the killing of the people in the field of Punjab. She writes:

"My back against barbed wire

snagged and coiled to belly height
on granite posts
glittering to the moon

No man's land
No women's either
I stand in the middle
of my life.

out of earth's soft

and turbulent core
a drum sounds
summoning ancestors
They rise
through puffs of grayish dirt
scabbed skins slit
and drop from them

They dance
a top the broken spurts
of stone

They scuff
the drum skins

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 23
with their flight heels"

Later in the same poem, she summons "ferocious alphabets of

flesh" to "splinter and raze her page". She cries out:
"Come ferocious alphabets of flesh
splinter and raze my page

That out of the dumb

and bleeding part of me

24
I claim my heritage."

In a poem titled Lost Language, she expresses an intense longing

for the lost language. She writes:
"It comes in flight
towards me
brushing against
an old stone wall
father's father raised
Laanguage so fine
it can not hold the light
for long and beats
as water might..." 25

Meena Alexander searches for her own identity amidst a world that
always labels and identifies people by race color and nationality. Even her
son Adam had an experience of this kind when a man asked him: "what are
you?" Adam, the son of mix heritage, chose the identity him as neither
American nor Indian but a Jedi knight. In a poem Brown Skin, what Mask?,
she describes a free make over in America only to turn herself into "a
hyphenated thing":
"No flim-flam now; card sharp, street wise
I fix my heels at Paul's shoe place for a dollar fifty
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 get a free make over at Macy's eyes smart, lips shine
Shall I be a hyphenated thing, Macaulay's Minutes
and melting pot theories notwithstanding?

Shall I bruise my skin, burn up into

She Who Is No Color. whose longing is a crush
of larks shivering without sound?” 25

Meena Alexander deals with the theme of violence, war, terrorism and
intolerance very poignantly. In the poem The young of Tiananmen, the
sacrifices of the young men and women of China have been eulogized. The
description of the rolling tanks, coughing guns is highly evocation. The poet
writes:

"Tanks rolled, guns coughed

tear gas choked them in pitiful
sobs: the young of Tiananmen
from a far country I sing

As blood swallowed them whole

they become our blood
as the sun swallowed them whole
they become children of the sun

What ink can inscribe them now

the young of Tiananmen." 27

Safdar Hashmi, a Young Marxist playwright was beaten to death on

January 1, 1989 while performing a play titled Hallabol in support of striking
women. Two days after this death, the players of the Jane Natya Manon
with Safdar's wife Moloyshree returned to the spot and performed the play.
There are two poems in the River and Bridge that deal with the death of

Page 127
Safdar Hashmi; one For Safdar Hashmi Beaten to Death Just outside Delhi
and the other addressed Safdar's brave wife Moloyshree. Safdar held the
door tight so that other actors might escape while he was attacked by armed
goons.

In a poem addressed to Moloyshree, Meena Alexander describes the

place where Safdar Hashmi was beaten to death:

"There
there they beat him by the tap
on scalp and skull with bits of rack
lathis tipped with steel, wrought iron
broken from the construction site.

You point out the spot, so silently

drawing your palms apart as if your
soul and his still hung on a thread

So hot only the dead could work

28
that needle, crawl through its eye"

The poet expresses the tyranny of patriarchy and colonization in

many of her poems. Compulsory acquisition of a colonial language splits the
subject's body and her sense of self. Her collection Illiterate Heart (2002),
won the 2002 PEN open Book Award. The book opens with the ten couplets
work Provenance meaning "the place of origin" in two of Alexander's
languages French and English. The central theme of the collection is how
identities are shaped by languages and they merge with and inscribe female
bodies. In a poem titled Fragments Alexander writes:

"I want to write:

The treasure bursting in to bloom

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 I felt it, though it did not come in that particular way, the sentence
end-stopped
could sense come in feverish script
finicky with rhyme, sharp as a wave?." 29

Three languages loom large in the poet's psyche English, French and
Malayalam. She describes the impact of these three languages on her body
and mind.

"What beats in my heart? who can tell?

I can not tense my writing hand around
that burnt hole of sense, figure out the
quick step of syllables.
On pages where I read the words of Gandhi
and Marx, saw the light of the Gospels,
the script started to quiver and flick.
Later grew fins and tails
swords sprang from the hips of consonants
vowels grew ribbed and sharp
pages bound in to leather
turned the color of ink
My body flew apart:
wrist, throat, elbow, thigh,
knee where a male rose
bone scapula, blunt cut hair,
then utter stillness as a white sheet
dropped on nostrils and neck.
Black milk of childhood drunk
30
and drunk again!'

However, she says that by using these languages and creating poetry
in theme, she is able to bind body and self into a unified whole. It is a

Page 129
movement towards self-definition. The language is both cruel and painful
but also heavenly. It is a means of subjugation but also of liberation. In a
poem An Honest Sentence, the poet turns to Greek mythology of
Agamemnon and Iphigenia, the sacrificial lamb who is sacrificed by her own
father. She stands for both a mythological figure and a violated woman. Her
vocal cords having been cut, she unable to utter words. The poet identifies
herself Iphigenia who like the tragic Greek mythological figure tried to "forge
an honest sentence" (53). Iphigenia the poet and 'women' merge and
emerge as injured voiceless sacrificial lamb of human history - The Female.
In Meena Alexander's writings women is brought back to life again and
again.

In a poem Like Mirabai, she refers the poem expresses the longing
of Meerabai who left Mewar in Rajasthan former the poem expresses the
longing of the speaker in the poem to leave an alien land forever. She says:

"History makes me hoarse! she tried,

"I'll never set foot in a house again like Meerabai!"
31
And by the river, she set her clattering burden down.

Meena Alexander, on seeing a painting by Edward Hopper at

Whitney, experiences the loneliness of living in a flesh of a woman.

"Still nothing comes out of her mouth -

I am she, I want to cry
to the thin air of Nyack, Hopper painted on
pale tremulous ground, stiff meadow grass.
The loneliness of living in the flesh
draws us out, half naked, to the edge." 32

Meena Alexander is a highly sensitive poet who does not remain

silent even on sensitive issues like 9/11, Babri Masjid, Godhra Carnage and
Hindu-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad. San Andreas Fault is a long poem in five

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parts. In part IV Package of Dreams, she refers to tragic lot of women in
human history:

"Late at night in half moon bay

hair loosed to the glow of traffic lights
I slit the moist package of my dreams.

Females still, quite metamorphic

I flowed into Kali ivory tongued, skulls nippling my breasts
Durga lips etched with wires astride an electric tiger
Draupadi born of flame betrayed by five brothers stripped
of silks in the banquet hall of shame.

In the ghostly light of those women's eyes

I saw the death camps at our century' end.

A woman in Sarajevo shot to death

as she stood pleading for pot of milk,
a scrap of bread, her red scarf swollen
with lead hung in a cherry tree.

Turks burnt alive in the new Germany

a grandmother and two girls
cheeks puffed with smoke
as they slept in striped blankets
bought new to keep out the cold." 33

And then she refers to violent riots and massacre that took place in
the name of Lord Rama who is called Karuna Nidhan and abode of mercy. It
is a pity that people kill one another in the name of religion and God even
today:
"In Ayodhya, in Ram's golden name
hundreds hacked to death, the domes

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 of Babri Masjid quivering as massacres begin,
the rivers of India rise mountainous,
white veils of the dead, dhotis, kurtas, saris,
slippery with spray, eyed from their bloodiness.” 34

No Man's Land is a poem about the aftermath of war, women washing

their thighs in the bloodied river. The poem contains highly evocative,
moving images:
"Infants crawl
sucking dirt from sticks
whose blunt ends
smack of elder flesh
and ceaseless bloodiness"
And,
"Women wash their thigh
in bloodied river water
over and over
they wipe their flesh
In stunned
immaculate gesture
figures massed with light" 35

Mena Alexander met Ramu Gandhi in 1974. He is grandson of

Mahatama Gandhi and his mother's father was Rajagopalachari, a
distinguished statesman and thinker. He pointed out to her how children
picked rags by the truck stops and how beggars squatted and bugged by the
piles of garbage outside St. Stephen's college. In Delhi, Meena Alexander
met Swati Joshi, the daughter of renowned Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi,
Swati and Meena became good friends, reading Pablo Nerula, attending
poetry reading, theater festivals etc. Meena met Umashankar Joshi whom
she called Bapuji. In Fault Lines, she writes about her indebtedness to
Umashankar Joshi.

Page 132
 "From Umashankar Joshi, I learnt of the fine pleasures of poetry, of a
life bound to the creation literature. As he cut vegetables to make
khichdi or stirred the rice and dal, we spoke of poems and the political
world. A follower of Gandhi even as a Youngman, he had lived and
worked in Sabarmati Ashram, I sensed that Bapuji belonged to the
same world as Ilya had, filled with a shining belief in how India could be
made anew. It was a world I appreciated deeply, though I did not see
how I could be a part of it. There was an amazing quality of light about
Umashankar, a true refinement of soul that touched all those around. It
was clear that poetry for him was part of the illumination that comes
from the shared world. It was inconceivable that it should be something
36
cut apart."

In River and Bridge there is a long poem titled - Paper filled with
Light, written in memory of Umashankar Joshi (1911-1989). The poem was
composed during September 8-18, 1990. For Umashankar Joshi, poetry was
'paper filled with light': it was an illumination. It was not escape from harsh
realities of the world and life. He was aware of violence, terror, inequality,
displacement and despair. He had witnessed the massacre of 1947, the
killing of partition. He had seen Gandhi praying and fasting. Meena
Alexander writes that she too has witnessed traumatic events lie massacre
of Shikhs in Delhi, rapes and riots in our times. She is unable to reconcile
these with lofty ideals of art and poetry. She asks:
"Umashankar I ask you now, what is the sun at midnight?
The spirit's flight? The gold roof of heaven?
What is death doing in the throats of those
from your Bamna, my Tiruvellea, crouched in Jordan's deserts?
What is death scribbling on their cheeks
as they stumble to a water truck long run dry?
I am here to Isamu's garden, by an old warehouse,
by a children's park, by the East River- rusty gasoline tanks - the
packed cars of new immigrants, the barbed wires
of Meerut, Bensonhurst, Baghdad, strung in my brain.
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 How could I sing of a plum tree, a stone that weeps water?
How could I dream of paper filled with light?" 37

The events of 9/11 and aftermath: military retaliation, racial profiling of

immigrants and international students made indelible impact on the psyche
of the immigrants in the USA. Three Indians were taken off the Boston train
in handcuffs. They were quite innocent but they were taken for terrorists.
Meena Alexander was worried about her children Adam and Swati Mariam.
An acquaintance cautioned Meena Alexander to be careful as her skin was
black. She would be taken for an Arab. She wrote a cycle of elegies for
dead titled Aftermath, Invisible city and Pit fire. These poems are included in
the collection of Raw Silk (2004). The poems in this collection mainly
describe the poet's emotions upon revisiting India after a long period and
finding many wounds and victims following ethnic violence in Ahmadabad,
Gujarat in September, 2002. Other poems are set in New York in the
aftermath of September 2001 terrorist attacks popularly known as 9/11.

Thus the collection can be seen as an attempt to negotiate a dual

trauma both for the poet herself and her subjects. In her piece Fragile
places: The poet's Note book, Alexander reflects: "What does it mean to
belong in a violent world?" Alexander explicitly says that the experiences of
violence, war and terrorism were a palimpsest. According to the Oxford
Dictionary, the word palimpsest means "something used again or altered but
still bearing the traces of earlier form". She insists that these poems were
flesh, torn out of her body. Though she was born after Independence, the
violence of partition was there in the memories of those who raised her.
Then she witnessed a long genocidal Civil War in Sudan where she spent
her adolescence period. She had heard of teargas, torture, and shooting by
the police and army. In India, she saw Emergency and later the
assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and riots and massacre of
Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. And then the terrorist attack on Twin Towers in New
York and Hindu Muslim riots in Ahmedabad.

Page 134
 Aftermath is the first of the three poems composed after 9/11 under the
title Late, There was an Island. The poem describes New York skyline and
Hudson river after 9/11 in highly poetic images:

"There is an uncommon light in the sky

pale petals are scored into stone
I want to write of the linden tree
that stoops at the edge of the river.
But its leaves are filled with insects
with wings the color of dry blood.
At the far side of the river Hudson
By the southern tip of our island
A mountain soars, a torrent of sentences
syllables of flame stitch the rubble
An eye, a lip, a cut hand blooms
sweet and bitter smoke stains the sky." 38

The second poem Invisible City begins with the last line of the first
poem. The city becomes invisible full of 'bruised trees' and the sky becomes
a 'Silver of mist" or 'bolt of beatitude". The poet says:
"Tall Towers, twin towers I used to see
A bloody seam of sense drop free
By liberty street, on a knot of rubble
In altered light, I see a bird cry". 39

The Pit Fire, the third poem in this sequence commences with the last
line of the second poem.
"In altered light I hear a bird cry
By the pit, for of metal, strait of death.
Bird song yet, Liturgies' de Cristal
Flesh in fiery pieces, mute sediments of love.
Shall a soul visit her mutilated parts?
Howch shall a body be home?" 40

Page 135
 After 9/11, South Asians were targeted. There was a pall of suspicions
all brown people who looked like Arabs. Meena Alexander had to attend a
meeting of the Asian/ Americans Research Institute in October. Usually, she
wore Sari while attending such a meeting but she was warned by friends and
students that it was not safe to put on a Sari. So she put a Sari in a plastic
bag and slipped out of her slacks and put on her Sari for the meeting. When
she looked into the mirror in the fourth floor ladies' room, she heard Kabir,
the medieval saint-poet singing to her. She felt that he was giving her the
courage to struggle to live. She wrote a poem titled Kabir sings in a City of
Burning Towers
"What a shame
they scared you so
you plucked your Sari off
crushed into a ball,

then spread it
on the toilet floor
sparks from the tower
fled through the wave of Silk

With your black hair

and sun dark skin
you're just a child of earth.
Kabir the weaver sings:

O men and dogs

in times of grief
our rolling earth
grows small. 41

The Color of Home is a poem about the death of Amadou Diallo, an

innocent African immigrant, who was brutally shot to death by the police as
Page 136
he was standing in his own doorway. Amadou's father was a trader in
gemstone and Amadou studied English travelling all the way from Guinea on
the West coast of Africa to Manhattan where he met his death. Fire Fly
portrays a victim of violence whose brother is ‘a field of hurt wheat’, his
father 'a singing ruin' and mother ‘crying with a mud in her mouth'.
“Something is scrawled on doors
I cannot see,
A firefly threads my eye.
Who am I?" 42

Green Parasol, as addressed by the poet to her daughter Swati

Mariam. The poet describes her birth and her growing-up in to an
independent, intelligent young girl. She says that all that she can gift her:
"It's all I have
this moist quilt work
of rooms an balconies,
continents torn, tampered with, blood thirsty." 43

The poet wants her to 'soar over the Bronx River/set fire to old
straw/light up the broken avenues of desire.
"Then be a girl like any other,
in soft mist, in flowering sunlight,
at the rim of stone gates,
raise a green parasol
under a green tree." 44

The title poem Raw Silk sings of countries, home and abroad, the
visions of raw silk from Varansi, bonfire of foreign goods ordained by
Mahatma Gandhi, Verlaine and Rimbaud, of ‘red dates clustered on the
bough of immortality’, smoke rising from island in the Nile and Silk worms
dancing in the firmament. The poet says:
"When I open the drawer
to search for silk
Page 137
 I touch smokes
raw silk turned to smoke in the night's throat" 45

Rumors for an Immigrant refers to Gandhi in Central Park with

“smoke in his palms, raising his Charkha, fluttering out of his dhoti". The
rumors spread that:
"There is no homeland anymore
all nations are abolished, a Youngman cries" 46

Petro Glyph is based on Kant's notions of geography. He talked of

erasure of borders and cosmopolitanism. It is a long poem in eight parts.
The poem talks about the supremacy of the whites, racialism and the poet's
journey on the Indian Ocean in childhood.
“Now I live on an island by the mid-Atlantic shore
Home is where when I go, they let me in" 47

The poet describes the 9/11 terrorist attacks on twin towers. She
describes herself standing by the "burning pit, a burial ground for thousands
of people killed in the attack”. The poet says:
" I hear names for ancient places: Istalif, Kabul, Kandahar.
I see women shrug off their veils, let sunlight
strike their cheeks. Women casting burkas
into flames no water can check. Children poking bits
of metal in unplowed land, a necklace of sorrow
48
mothers bear, throats parched with blood".

Alexander says that out of fire and ruin, a new world might immerge,
the world adorned with ornaments of unity. At the end of the poem, she
writes:
"Elsewhere in the meadow of hot bones,
grown up girls make implacable plans
than rise on tiptoe with lost larks to sing." 49

Page 138
 Triptych in a Time of War refers to Farokh Zad (1933-67), a poet of
Tehran who wrote dazzling poems. The poet also refers to Enheduanna
(2300 B.C.) the earliest poet known in recorded history. The word ‘Triptych’
means a picture or carving on three panels hinged together vertically. The
poem evokes the terror and tragedy of war.
"O the bomb is fears flower
there is no love in the bomb,
only chaos the sea must swallow.
The flowers of Mesopotamia are tiny, blue edged,
driven under the skin of earth. But where can children hide?
The mouth of the cave is rimmed with red." 50

The poets are messengers of love and peace. They are always “in
search of language that could tell of love" and justice. Alexander concludes
the poem referring to Enhedunna, the poet of love and brotherhood:
"you hear her words unfurl on the screen,
bare sound, filled with longing
syllables of raw silk, this poem." 51

The poem Amrita is inspired by photomontages of Vivan Sundaram's

Retake of Amrita. The poet here imagines Amrita Shergil speaking after
Gujarat atrocities. The poet had seen a child named Yunus in a relief camp
in Ahemdabad. Amrita Shergill is the speaker in the poem. Yunus, a Muslim
child victim of communal riots in Ahmedabad cites:
"My mane is
Yunus
Yunus can you hear me?

He stands there
half naked
his green shirt
torn, flapping
His belly and ribs
Page 139
 smoking

He skips away
I see his bottom
burst like a raw fruit
with the flames
they tossed him in." 52

Amrita, the artist feels that her paints and brushes are bright as
bone. Violence of any kind offends the artist who feels at least for a while
that her art has no meaning, no relevance in the world torn by violence,
inhumanity and cruelty. In Naroda Patiya is another tragic poem describing
communal violence in Ahmedabad. The poem is truly heart trending that
describes killing of a woman carrying a child in her womb:
"Dark eyes
the color of burnt
almonds, face
slashed, lower
down where her belly
shone
a wet gash
Three armed men
out they plucked
a tiny heart
beating with her own
No cries
were heard
in the city.
Even the sparrows
by the temple gate
swallowed their song" 53

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 Searching for a Tomb over which they paved a Road is based on the
pulling down of the tomb of the 17th century Muslim poet, Wali Gujarati(also
known as Wali Deccani) by Hindu extremists. The Hindu fanatics forgot the
fact that he loved his city Surat dearly and 'he sang her praises to the moon".
His tomb was razed and they paved a road over it. The Hindu extremists
wanted to erase his name from the records of history and poetry. Wali cries
out:
"I am the poet of a city
in ruins
burnt by the sun
bound to the moon
They reeds
by the river
are lashed to swords.
My dust is in the mouth
of the bloodied rose.54

Meena Alexander was in Ahmedabad on September 11 to visit the

relief camps for the survivors of ethnic violence. Letters to Gandhi contains
four poems depicting bloody carnage in Ahmedabad, Babri Masjid demolition
and Ramu Gandhi's conversation with the poet. The poem Slow Dancing
opens with a question to Mahatma Gandhi:
"Dear Mr. Gandhi
Please say something
about the carnage in your home state

How did you feel when they shut

the gates of Sabarmati Ashram
that February night
and wounded clung outside?
What lips, what soles
swarmed across the river?
Is it hot on the other side?
Page 141
 Oh, so many questions, sir,
I cannot help myself
I cannot shut my mouth.

It's hard to hear you,

birds peck at sounds,
maggots gnaw since

even syllables have skin

the kingdom of heaven
is tiny as a mustard seed

and you have crawled there in." 55

Gandhi's Bicycle (My muse comes to Me) is the fourth poem in

Letters to Gandhi. The words in the poem are put into the mouth of Ramu
Gandhi, Gandhi's grandson and addressed to the poet. He says to the poet
that he has come to her "with a jute bag filled bits of cloth marked with the
colors of heaven. He tells her that the earth is cut from underfoot". He refers
to Swami Vivekananda who on September 11, 1893 in Chicago addressed
the audience as "sisters and brothers of America". He asks her harmony of
us would dare to say' that now? Ramu Gandhi, a true heir of Gandhiji tells
her that they should continue to spread the message of love, harmony,
peace and humanity even in the teeth of war. He says:
"But we need to say that you and I
even in the teeth of war. Come closer now.
Do you hear the still sad music
of children killed in Godhra and Naroda Patiya?
Come closer to this table, cut
from a tamarind tree in my grand father's garden.
You can write your poems here
so they gather the sour sweet light of eternity." 56
Page 142
 Fragile Places is a key poem in the collection which has partly set in
Gujarat where Mahatma Gandhi lived and partly in Kerala where the great
Vedantic philosopher was born in 8th century A.D. He declared that only
Brahman (the Ultimate Reality) is true while the phenomenal world is Maya,
an illusion, the zone of the unreal. The poem begins with Sankaracharya's
quote: "The world is a forest on Fire." It is the central theme of the poem
with the images of fire of violence in the world. Meena Alexander quotes
Tagore's words: "I lay with you at the water's edge/ a red rose blossomed in
my breast" that suggest love amidst violence and war. Juxtaposing
Sankaracharya, Gandhi and Tagore is suggestive of the ideals of unity,
peace and liberal, secular view of religion. In modern times, "Identities are
pulled apart/ on the tongs of war." The poet recalls her matriarchal lineage
and her birth place Kaladi where the great Sankaracharya was born.
Another important figure in the poem is of a woman who responds to the
killing of an innocent child in bombing by turning to write instead of washing
rice in the kitchen. The woman is the poet herself who has a faith in the
power of creativity and poetry:
"Who dares to burn
with the stamp of love?
Words glimmer
then the slow
march to sentences.
Sankara speaks to me." 57

The poem displays diasporic sensibility in Fragile Places by calling the

places 'fragile'. The poet is rooted in India, in Kerala her home. She lives in
the USA but returns to India to mourn its state. She says:
"I have come to ground
in my own country
by the Pemba's edge"
in a field of golden rice
where shades gather." 58
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 She visits her grandmother's house her inheritance and yet she feels
like an interloper. She is "unable to reconcile those that are scattered/ with
those bound in fragile places". Thus migrants are destined to be scattered
and yet bound and this creates an identity split. Gender, religious and
national differences are the dominating forces that create violence and war.
Men have failed to provide peace. On the contrary, they have perpetrators
of violence and war. Women have acted as the guardians of lineage
transcending race, caste, religion and beliefs. Women poets right from
Sappho refused to be silenced and they voice the thorny realities of their
own lives and the lives of the people all around them. Despite the onslaught
of soul-crushing patriarchy, colonialism, race and religion, women poets
have expressed the anguish of the world paving the way for love, peace and
harmony in the world.

Meena Alexander in an interview with Ruth Maxey for Kenyon

Review on February 25 and 28, 2005 said about the task of poetry:

"Camus says in the Myth of Sisyphus that there's only one

philosophical question: whether to commit suicide. And he says, "
the point is to live." He says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy
as he pushes the stone up. Seen in that way, that act of writing is
intrinsic to the act of living. 59

For Meena Alexander, poetry is the music of survival and place is

the instrument on which that music is played. She did not have a one single
place to live, a place called home or the language she could call her own
language. She felt stranded in the multiplicity that marked her writing and her
life. The first border that a woman poet has to cross is that of her body. This
border of flesh and bone becomes a boon into existence. Memory has
played a very important role in her creation of poetry. She knows about the
oral power of poetry and scriptlessness. The title poem Illiterate Heart is

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about a women who falls between language and has no script. Alexander
says that "for her writing a poem is like rinsing the language". 60

It can be summed up the words of Meena Alexander that tells how

migrant memory shaped and gave birth to her poems:

“Home for me is bound up with migrant's memory and the way that
poetry as it draws the shining threads of the imaginary through the
crannies of everyday life, permits a dwelling at the edge of the
world.”61

Sujata Bhatt, like Meena Alexander, is a remarkable diasporic woman

poet. She was born in Ahmedabad, India in 1956. She graduated from
writers' workshop, University of Iowa. At present she lives in Germany with
her husband and a daughter. She has worked in the United States of
America and in Canada. She was a visiting writer at the University of
Victoria, British Columbia. Her poetical works includes:

Brunizem (1988)
The Monkey Shadows (1991)
The Stinking Rose (1995)
Point No Point (1997)
Augatora (2000)
A Colour for Solitude (2002)

Her poems have been widely anthologized and also have been
translated into more than a dozen languages. She has received a
Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000.
Sujata Bhatt has lived in India, the US, Canada and Europe. She has also
widely travelled across different cultures. She is a highly perceptive artist
and art lover. Her collection of poems A Colour for Solitude shows her deep
sensitivity and understanding of paintings. In this collection, she deals with
Paul Modersohn Becker (1876-1907), a young, energetic woman who went
her own way against all odds and carved her niche as a painter. Modersohn

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Becker belonged to an artists' colony in Worpswede, near Bremen. She died
at a young age after giving a birth to a daughter. She left behind her a
remarkable body of work which has made her one of the greatest modern
painters of her time. Sujata Bhatt was fascinated by her self-portraits and in
her poems in A Colour for Solitude, she imagines the painter's inner and
outer worlds. The poems also explore her friendship with Rilke and his wife,
the sculptor Clara Westhoff. Sujata Bhatt herself lived in Bremen and visited
Worpswede frequently. She explores in these poems not only the painter's
inner and outer worlds but also the weather, the landscape, the language
and music of Northern Germany. Her perspective, however, remains that of
an outsider, an alien visitor.

Sujata Bhatt's poetry shows the signs of her understanding of time,

history and cultures. It exhibits the impact of these forces on the poetry self
and identity. In her first three volumes of poetry, we find a kind of Tensional
quality resulting from displacement and uprooting from one's own home,
country, culture, language and environment. Sujata Bhatt experiences the
pang of displacement but does not exhibit it the way other diasporic poets
do. She carries with her the seeds of home wherever she goes. A sense of
continuity of relationship with home remains uninterrupted and unbroken. It
pervades through her poetry and she expresses her sense of home in the
following way:

“I am the one
who always goes
away with my home
which can only stay inside
in my blood my home which does not fit
with any geography.” 62

For her, home is not a mere geographical entity; it is the part and
parcel of her identity, her inner psyche. Even when she is away from home,

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she is with home all the time. She does not let it part from her - she says in
the same poem :

“But I never left home

I carried it away
with me-here in my darkness
in myself.” 63

Home remains central her consciousness in all circumstances. It is true

that Sujata Bhatt's concerns are global but she returns to the local or native
experiences now and then relating herself to them intimately. When she
writes about Hindu-Sikh riots in Delhi, she remembers how she used to lay
with Sikh boy in her childhood. Whenever she paints poverty, she evokes the
picture of poverty and squalor she had witnessed in Ahmedabad, her home
town.

For Sujata Bhatt, home and nation are not just places but amalgam of
memories of individuals, legends, relationships, legends, anecdotes, family
rituals and history of one's own country. However, she knows that for her,
history is a broken narrative, fragmented by post-colonial consciousness.
The poem titled History is a Broken Narrative depicts the agony of
displacement. Sujata Bhatt says:

“History is a broken narrative.

Pilka story and see where
It will lead you.
You take your language where you get it
or do you.
Get your language where you take it ?
I got my in New Orleans.
In New Orleans, when I was five.
A whole new alphabet to go with the new world.” 64

Then her mother tongue her through the old alphabets and,
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 “I felt as if the different scripts be longed
together; I felt them raw, clotting together
in my mind,
Raw, itchy - the way skin begins to heal.” 65

At the end, she frames an equation between history's broken narrative

and the narrative of the diasporic self. A diasporic self makes a language
when he/she changes it. Bhatt says:

“History is a broken narrative

Where you make your language
When you change it.” 66

In her pomes is Brunizem and Monkey Shadows, she evokes images

of home and the country through birds, animals and insects like peacock,
lizard, crocodile, monkeys etc. They are not merely physical entities but the
part of her psyche. She also revokes the past through the personalities like
Swami Anand, Nanabhai Bhatt, Devibahen Pathak and her grandmother.
She also refers to ancient mythological figures like Lord Hanuman, Goddess
Kalika, Nachiketa and so on. As a diasporic poet, she connects herself with
her home and nation through these figures. The diasporic writer's sense of
identity is ascertained and strengthened through the images of past and
history of his/her country. Most of the diasporic writers draw images from
their home and nation amalgamating memory and nostalgia. The sense of
exile is often very strong in some diasporic poets while Sujata Bhatt keeps it
in low key referring to her permanent sense of home within her. In her
poems like A memory from Marathi, Honeymoon, My Mother's Way of
Wearing a Sari. She expresses her preoccupation with her childhood and
past very strongly. In the poem My mother's Way Wearing a Sari, she uses
language as a metaphor for diasporic reality. Like the diasporic poet's
identity, her language is constantly in flux. She expresses this idea of
changing identity in Augatora :
“Constantly changing its colours

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 as if trying to win me over
with its simmering starlets and blacks
then always slipping out of my grasp - and yet
refusing to go away - “ 67

Sujata Bhatt's multicultural perspectives on language, literature, art and

culture arise from her own multicultural experiences. Born in India in Gujarat,
her mother tongue Gujarati, she has studied in England and the USA, taught
in Canada, travelled widely, delved in various arts such as painting,
sculpture, literature and so on and now lives in Germany and works there.
Her poetry is deeply meditative and philosophical. Her quest is for difficult
truths of experiences. Her poetry deals with Indian Landscape and mores
towards Europe and America but India remains a necessary obsession. Her
preoccupation with cultural identity runs throughout her poetry about places,
memories, various art forms, politics and science. As a poet and translator of
Gujarati poetry into English, her major concern has been language or
languages. She asks in Augatora (2000).

“What happened when the Gujarati

and the Marathi and the Hindi
I spoke
made room for the English words.” 68

Such rhetorical questions recur in her works and they express the poet's
genuine quest for fluid identity. Sujata's poetical world is full of colours,
sounds and fragrance.

Her first collection Brunizem (1988) has almost half of the poems set in
India where she recalls her family, childhood memories and sights sounds
and smells of village life. Here she recalls “how long and road-dust and wet
canna lilies / the smell of monkey breath and freshly washed clothes". She
returns to her city Ahmedabad after ten years. She experiences mixed
feelings of nostalgia and confusion. They draw upon Indian myths, deities

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and especially of animals: “Here, the gods roam freely / disguised as snakes
or monkeys.” In Indian mythology, animals play a very important role. They
are often the gods themselves or the vehicles of gods. They possess divine
powers.

Sujata Bhatt compares the dreams of a young widow with buffaloes

'lazily swishing their tails, dozing.' In a poem Something for Plato, a wreck a
rhinoceros symbolizes ‘philosophical conundrums of soul and body’. Some
of her poems are highly erotic. In Kamasutra Retold invokes Yeasts’s
famous Swan to dramatize a 17 year old girl's first act of love. In another
poem titled Sherdi (sugarcane), love-act is described

“they why I learned

to eat sugar cane...
suck hard with my teeth, pressdown
and the juice spills out.”

Sujata Bhatt's metaphors often give erotic plays to language though

her preoccupation with language is also political. In her poem she A Different
History, she says:
“Great Pan is not dead;
he simply migrated
to India.
Here, the gods roam freely
disguised as snakes and monkeys;
every tree is sacred -
and it is a sin
to be rude to a book.
It is a sin to shove a book aside
with your foot;
a sin to slam books down
hard on a table,
a sin to toss one carelessly

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 across a room.
You must learn how to turn the pages gently
without disturbing Sarasvati,
without offending the tree
from whose woods the paper was made.” 69

Sujata Bhatt refers to Indian way of looking at animals, birds and other
elements of nature. She refers to colonial nature of language when she says:

“Which language has not been the oppressor's

tongue ?
which language
truly meant to murder someone ?
And how does it happen
that after the torture,
ofter the soul has been cropped
with the long scythe swooping out
of the conqueror’s face
the unborn grandchildren
grow to love that strange language ?” 70

The oppressor's tongue becomes the language of the oppressed.

History is a strange phenomenon where quite often the language of the
colonizer becomes the weapon for freedom from colonialism for the
colonized as has been the case with English. English exercised a
tremendous influence in intellectual life of India. Bengal was the first
province where English was introduced first and its impact was almost
revolutionary. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the first social reformer, patriotic
pioneer undertook the comparative study of religions. He was a pioneer of
Bengali prose which later influenced other vernaculars of India also. Bengal
produced great patriots, social reformers, literary writers and thinkers under
the influence of English. This shows that the tongue of the colonizers act as
a catalyst for freedom and renaissance of an oppressed country.

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 Her poem Search for My Tongue arises from listening to a tape
recording sent by her mother from India to her in Maryland, USA. It has a
crescendo like progress made possible by extensive use of Gujarati her
mother tongue, with words transcribed in to English within the first part and
the third part are in English while the second part in Gujarati with English
transcript in brackets. The poet asks:

“I ask you, what would you do

if you had two tongues in your month,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.” 71

The poet says that one cannot use both the languages together and if
one has to use a foreign language all the time, one's mother tongue would
rot and die in one's mouth. She says that she felt like spitting out her mother
tongue completely. But at night, her mother tongue returns to her in her
dream. It blossoms and blooms like a flower on her tongue and ripens like a
fruit in her mouth. Then,
“it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue
it blossoms out of my mother.” 72

The poem expresses the poet's fear that she was losing her identity as
a Gujarati speaking Indian. It comes from a time when she was studying in
America. She feared that she was being Americanized and she was
forgetting her mother tongue Gujarati. As she had to use English all the time,
she felt that her mother tongue would not and die in her mouth. Then,

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however, as she dreams, her mother tongue reasserts itself in her first
language. In the beginning, she expresses her distress that she is losing her
mother tongue in USA where she had to speak in Americanized English. She
fears that the two languages were at war and the foreign language seemed
to be winning. But at the end, she feels that her mother tongue reasserts
itself at the centre of her life and she is proud of it. The allusion to her
dreams has two meanings: one that she speaks in Gujarati in her dreams
and also that it is dream and longing to speak it always. Thus the poet is
proud and happy at regaining her identity which she was afraid she had lost.
The poem is a fine example of the expression of diasporic sense of a loss of
language and cultural identity. However, Sujata Bhatt reconciles English and
Gujarati finally asserting that one can never forget one's mother tongue as it
would blossom out of one's mouth pushing other language aside. The initial
feeling of anguish at the loss of mother tongue is finally replaced by the
confident reassertion of the mother tongue strengthening the identity of the
poet as Gujarati, Indian.

The Dream is a poem about childhood memory of a dream on a windy

morning. The poet was about ten or eleven years old. She had been ill for
several days and she slept till late dreaming of a snake green at first, then
changing into blue and orange. It was trying to win her over with its
shimmering starlets and blacks. It slipped out of her grasp and yet did not
leave her. Her father watched her from the door-way said:

“Don't resist
You must accept it
Then is no point
in fighting with the snake.” 73

Sujata evokes sensuous imagery that symbolize longing and nostalgia.

There's always a lost for life in her poems.

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 Angatora is the title poem about the loss of the word when languages
collided bitterly, bloodily. Windoge or vindauga means wind eye, the hole,
the opening out into the wind. The wind blows into the house through it.
Augatora means eye-gate, the hole for the eye to measure the sun, the gate
opening to the sun and light. The poet says:

“Keep an eye on the house

Keep an eye on the child.
Don't let the child fall out of the window.
Don't throw your house out of the window.”74

A Memory from Marathi recalls the poet's childhood memory of sound

of water, the memory that would not go away from the poet's mind. The poet
was three year old girl and she was thirsty in the middle of the night. Her
mother was sleeping with her new born son. The poet's father went to fetch
water for her in the kitchen but it took a long time and she saw that there was
a snake between her and her father. The poet's father killed it with a stick
and poured kerosene over it.

“It bled and bled-I could never forget

the redness streaming out
of the broken skin.”75

Many years later, he told her that it won lucky that he killed it. The
poem evokes violent image of killing a snake probably suggesting
unwelcome memory or disgusting emotion. There is yet another poem
referring to snakes titled The Snake Cather Speaks. The poem says that the
best way to catch a northern water snake is to corner it in a lake and let it
bite on one's arm. It will hold on tight even as one raises one's arm out of
water. It hurts as six rows of teeth cut into one's flesh but it is a non
poisonous snake, shy and elusive, aggressive only when it is conformed.
The speaker in the poem shows the snake to the students and finally let it

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loose in the woods. Memories like snakes cling to one's mind hurting and yet
harmless. Once one let stream loose, they bolt in a flash out of one's hands.

History is Broken Narrative contains poem referring to partition, Pope,

Tito and the WHO, earthquake, New Orleans, killing of a girl child, Shirodkar
Suture, Jerusalem, Red Army and other events and personages with political
or historical context. Partition is a poem describing the horrible experience of
partition of India in 1947 by the poet's mother who was nineteen years old
then. She could hear the cries the people stranded in Ahmedabad railway
station. Her father's sister went to the railway station with food and water
everyday but she stood in the garden listening to strange horrible sounds.
She had no courage of go with her aunt. The poet's mother tells the poet that
she wished she had gone with her aunt to feed the people stranded at the
railway station. She, at the age of seventy and India with fifty years of
independence, feels guilty for her lack of courage. She says that India was
older than that and it was always there. And at the end, she asks the poet:

“How could they

have let a man.
Who knew nothing
about gegoraphy
divide a country ? 76

Sujata Bhatt in one of her short poems Diabetes Mellitus says that if
Gandhiji had acute diabetes, he would not have his fasts unto death and like
the poet's mother's mother, he would have gone into a coma. Sujata often
used medical and scientific terminology in her poems. This is indicative of
her knowledge of various subjects like science, medicine, geography and so
on. The poem The Pope, Tito had the Who refers to the trio who were
mentioned over and over on All India Radio in those days. Children became
quiet as they listened to their names. The boy decided to be the Pope, the
girl wanted to be a doctor but Tito remained a mystery for the children. This

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is a poem in a lighter vein about the days when children were highly
influenced by radio news.

Voice of the Unwanted Girl is a moving poem about a girl who has
been done away with before birth. The dead girl addresses her mother
saying that when the doctor told her that she was a girl child, the doctors
gave an injection to kill her. She says:

“Before I died I heart

the traffic rushing outside the on soon
Slvsh, the wind sulking through
your beloved Mumbai.”

The girl's mouth did not search for anything and her head was cut apart
like a sliced pomegranate. The girl’s mother put on her grass green sari and
orange stems of Parijatak blossoms adorned her hair. Afterwards, all were
happy and smiling. The last part of the poem is profoundly appealing.
“But now I ask you
To look for me, mother,
look for me because
I won’t come to you in your dreams.
Look for me, mother, look
because I won’t become a flower
I won’t turn into a butterfly.
And I am not a part of anyone’s song.
Look, mother
look for the place where you have sent me
Look for the unspeakable,
for the place that can never be described.
Look for me, mother, because
this is not ‘God’s Will’
Look for me, mother
Because I smell of formaldehyde-

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 I smell of formaldehyde.
and still I wish you would look
for me, mother.” 77

Kalika deals with the theme of loss because of the protagonist’s

mother’s death and the continuity of the matrilineage through mother’s
nurturance.

The title poem History is a Broken Narrative is an intelligent discourse

on language and history. Sujata Bhatt in this long poem in three parts
present broken narratives in different slots of time 1996, 1953, 1963 and
1968. She says:
“History is a broken narrative.
There is more than one way
to cut out a voice
more than one way to make a tongue bleed.
Where is the myth?
And where is the emblem?
You make your language when you change it.” 78

The poet further says:

“It will give you time
time to gather up the fallen pieces
of your language - one by one
with your mouth, with your mouth - you need time
to pick up the scattered pieces of your language
and the way to the neighbor's house is endless
with your mouth like a bird.” 79
The poet says that she has a clear memory of her life before English
and her life after English. She adopted English quietly and easily without
even noticing. She asks:
“What happened when the Gujarati
and Marathi and Hindi
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 I spoke
made rooms for the English words.” 80

Sujata Bhatt is diasporic poet stands for assimilation and acceptance.

Human history, she thinks, is a broken narrative with the phase of
fragmentation, assimilation and renewal. Her approach to her diasporic
entity is marked by understanding, assimilation, and reconciliation. In
Jerusalem, she states a universal truth:
"It is so hard to describe the truth".

Her poem 'Language' is addressed to Johannes Bobrowski, a German

poet. She reads his poems translated into English but she finds herself
remembering her direct way to the poet's German sounds.

“In the end, the birch tree

did n't break and the ice melted
and I could walk beside the river
with your words
an mediated, un-translated in my mouth."81

Sujata Bhatt returns to her favorite subject of language again and

again. In Jane to Tarzan, Jane writes to Tarzan:
“Already you have changed
my language, my sleep
At first
I thought I should teach you
English - return to you
what you have lost
But you have changed the sounds
I listen for
the sounds I want to keep
near me.”

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 The poem has erotic, sensuous description. Jane tells Tarzan that he
has changed her sleep and also the darkness within her dreams. She says:
“Hunter, ravisher, you are more
that that - with your raw speech
you have tracked me down
with your raw speech you have changed
the way I look at trees
the way I hold a stone
the fruits I eat.
..... ……………………
Homeland is always green,
Homeland is nice word
to exercise your jaw.
…………………………….
Still we circle each other
wary of our needs, wary
of our meanings -
the word I know
cannot help me.
……………………………..
You have changed my smell
and my sweat and yes,
my skin which sleeps with language.
………………………………….
How could you - how could you
change my language, my sleep?

How could you make me want

to change myself so much.”83

Sujata Bhatt says that homeland is a sweet word for one's tongue to
speak. It is always green in one's memory but the language, the sounds may
change with the environment, and with the place you live in and love.
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 In Ars poetica, there is a fine poem on women titled Is it a Voice?

“It is a voice
or is it a women?
or shall I say: there is a voice
that is a women?
She greets you
with her Smokey eyes and her head held high
she stands where the trees are slender.
She is so silent
for someone who is a voice.” 84

My mother's way of wearing a Sari depicts memories of the poet's

mother in the poet's mind. The picture of the poet's mother wearing Sari
arises before her mind's eyes. She is quite fast at wrapping her Sari round
her body, measuring each plant and aligning them carefully, tacking them
into her waistband. The poet feels that she would have wore silk instead of
coarse handspun khadi. It is ordinary, plain, sturdy and clean. It smells of
sandal wood. The poet reminds her of her reddish yellow sari but she only
nods but does not wear it. She has put them away in the wardrobe
occasionally stroking them while showing them to her daughter. The poet's
mother gets up early in the morning when it is still dark. She has to fill all the
clay pitcher and vessels with water. The poet's younger brother is still
asleep and mother has to finish all her daily chores before her mother-in-law
calls her for the kitchen. The poet is unable to sleep thinking about the
duties and toils of a dutiful Indian woman. ‘Sari’ here represents not a mere
cloth for wearing but symbolizes, power, blessing, curse, personality and so
on. The poet's reminiscences of her mother present her diasporic longing
and memory of her mother and home. The poem had graphic description of
how the poet's mother wears a Sari:
“And then I watch
my mother balance

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 the pleated part of her Sari
against her waist-
how she measures
and weights each pleat
against each other -
Finally, aligning them into a flowing fan-”85

A Detail from the Chandogya Upanishad refers to the Indian metaphor

for the sun as the honey of gods, a golden being with red eyes. His red eyes
are compared to a red lotus flower and the redness of a lotus flower is
compared to a monkey's red bottom. In Sanskrit, these comparisons are
compressed in one line. The poet asks:
“Is it innocence - is it
Objectivity?
Or is it simply the reverence?

Will you pray to the Sun?

to the lotus or to the monkey?” 86

Here Sujata Bhatt, points to the Indian way of looking at life and nature.
She refers to all inclusiveness of Indian approach to life Poem for a Reader
Who was Born Blind, shows that the blind people understand colors in their
own distinct ways. The poet imagined herself blind and listened to a
Mongolian shepherd's song. She could hear horses, the vast blueness,
snow, a fox and a prairie dog in her song. She felt:

“And then - the blueness

started to seep into my chest…” 87

Multicultural Poem is a manifesto of multicultural writing. The very

opening introduces the concept of multicultural poetry:

“How the tongue must change

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Its color for every language
little chameleon bruised by your teeth.
Pull it out, pull it out, the silence
the silence between
the cadence and the syntax-”

Further the poet says that multicultural poem is a creature,

“a being
whose spirit breaths
like an or child in the sun
still wet from the rain
one day when the garden tilts slippery, sublime
on a day when
the garden dazzles with bird song.”

The multicultural poem cannot be tamed. It would not be anyone's pet it

is meant to be read at the border; it does not expect to be understood
as it is used to being misunderstood.
“It speaks of refraction
It wants more dialogue
between the retina and the light
It says, get rid of that squint'

It lives the chapter in history

they can't teach you in school
It likes no wear a mask - everyday
a different face –

The multicultural poem is not afraid to

Photograph
lotuses
It is not afraid to live
inside a nightingale
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 some days it will eat roses
uncooked - straight from the bush
some days it will eat snakes.”

Sujata Bhatt highlights the inclusiveness and assimilative element of

the multicultural poem. It makes its own rules: It has not set rules to follow
nor does it follow any. It likes the word terracotta and it uses words lie
telescope and other scientific terms.
“It is not afraid
to sleep with the muse
Nights it will dream
of kingfishers, it will
dream of bicycles
It will find its words
in the time between the shadows
in the sounds between
the crows fighting in the guava trees…” 88

Meeting the Artist in Durban is a poem about a Black self-taught artist

who got wood out of river. He never chopped down trees but sat by the
rivers for hours watching for wood. The fished for wood he called 'Koodoo'
and then carved it in a shape of a man, women or animals. He stayed
silently in a bush and watched birds. He planted new trees. He learnt to
speak English on his own. He complains that his people fight among
themselves and often beat their women. Therefore, he carved a woman, a
big woman, bent down with age and hard humiliating life.

Ars Poetica is a title poem that expresses Sujata's love for vowels in
poetry. She says:
“You asked me who envied most
which writer? which poet?
who would I want to be
if I could choose
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 to be other than myself?”

Then she replies that it is not necessarily a writer but the poem that she
envied. It is not simply the poem but the cadence that moved her. It is not
only the cadence but the way certain lines are sung by certain singers that
appealed to her. She says that she would like to be Fredrika Brillembaury
who played the role of orphans in Berlioz version of Gluck's opera. She says
that she would like to be the song that accompanied her as she strode
across the stage in her black suit, her body like a huge wounded wing. She
envied Fredrika Brillembaury acting as orphans singing all these vowels full
of loss and hope, screaming for his beloved wife Eurydice. Sujata Bhatt
concludes the poem saying:
“Envy? Oh yes.
Oh yes
I would like to disappear
into these vowels.” 89

Of Monkey Shadows (1991), Bhatt wrote in the poetry book society

bulletin that her baby daughter was its muse and most of the poems were
written during the first two years of her life. The collection contains poems
expressing how parent's protective anxieties in the wider context of issues
affecting Europe and America. The Stare is one of the beautiful poems set
in India, observing small children staring at a monkey child.
“There is that moment
when the young women child
stares
at the young monkey child
who stares back
Innocence falling
innocence in a space
where the young monkey child
is not in captivity.

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 There is purity
clarity
there is transparence
in the stare
which lasts a long time...

Eyes of water
eyes of sky
the soul can still fall through
because the monkey
has yet to learn fear
and the human
has yet to learn fear
let alone arrogance.”

The monkey child looks at the human child not in the same way as it
would look at its siblings. The human child also looks at the monkey child as
a totally different being. And yet, there exists good will and curiosity on their
faces. Sujata Bhatt says:
“I would like to slip inside
that stare, to know
what the human child thinks
what the monkey child thinks
at that very moment.”

The human child is at the age when he begins to use words. For him,
the word is the thing itself.
“Language is simply
a necessary mark
suddenly connected
to the child's own heart beat.”

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 However, the young monkey child grows at a different rate. It looks at
a tree, a bush or at a human child. What it must be thinking is a mystery. It
has no words like the ones in human languages. It does not define things as
human do. For the monkey child, the word is not a thing but a thing is a
thing without definition.
“What remains burning
is that moment
of staring:
the two newly formed heads
balanced on fragile necks
tilting towards each other.
The monkey face
and the human face
observing each other
with intense gentleness...” 91

Maninagar Days present the poet's childhood memories of Maninagar

in Ahmedabad where monkeys jumped from trees into cool shadow spots.
There were rhesus monkeys that travel in large groups with their extended
families. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins fight among
themselves while the grandmother sat far away holding on to the sleepy new
born. Before every meal, however, truce took place. Hanuman monkey the
langur with thick tufts of silver grey eyebrows remained aloof unbothered.
Children and monkeys feel closer to each other though they do not play with
each other and monkeys are often a verse to children.
“Still, the children treat the monkeys
as if they were children newly arrived from a foreign
country, unable to speak the language yet”

Without monkeys, trees look barren to the children. They climb up the
Gulmohur trees refusing to come down. The children are jealous of
monkeys for they too like to eat the Gulmohur flowers. They try to coax the
monkeys to throw some flowers down.
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 “Oh with monkeys like that
the children believe an Hanuman.
In their secret wishes the children reinvent
the perfect monkey. Hanuman
wild and fierce and loyal and gentle.”

Hanuman is in Indian mythological character the son of wind God

Maruti and Anjana, a goddess turned into a monkey by a curse. Hanuman is
considered the most powerful, most intelligent and the most learned. He is
also considered to be the ideal of perfect servant who finds full realization of
manhood, faithfulness and obedience. He exemplifies the ideal of
egolessness, humility and obedience to Sri Ram.
“Some people have monkeys
in their dreams, monkeys in their nightmares
monkey crossing their shadows
long after they have dropped being children
long after they have left such a garden...” 93

The Glassy Green and Maroon presents nostalgic memory of the poet's
mother wearing sturdy thick green and maroon glass bangles that
accompanied all her daily chores reflecting morning sun, afternoon sun and
evening light. Sujata Bhatt says that such sturdy bangles are no more
available in Ahmedabad or Delhi. Now everything is fragile and breakable
like rusty tin shack, raw spaghetti' and dry twigs of the termite emptied trees.

Ajwali Ba was Sujata's grandmother (her father' mother), Nanabhai

Bhatt, a great educationist, freedom fighter, social worker and Gandhian was
her grandfather. Sujata here presents a fine portrait of Ajwali Ba and
Nanabhai. It was an oft-told story by her father as a sort of preface to some
philosophical point. It was repeated so many times that the scene unfolded
before her eyes at the mere mention of it. The story was like this: Nanabhai
returned home at 1.00 a.m. spending whole day with Harijans, the

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oppressed caste among the Hindus. Ajwali Ba blocked his way saying that
he could enter only after taking a bath outside. Nanabhai was too tired and
pleaded for admission, but she insisted maintaining distance so that he could
not pull her with his slightest touch. She did not want to change her rules
and stuck to her orthodox Brahmin principle. Nanabhai decided to sleep in
the garden. Then there was a pause after a few minutes, Ajwali Ba rushed
outside running across the courtyard leading to the mango orchard to join
him. The poet says

“We'll never know what

made her change her mind
perhaps she doesn't know herself
But I can feel her sweeping gesture
her brisk strong arms
tearing into the air
and crescent eyebrows that I've inherited
and impatience to understand him...”

Sujata Bhatt says that soon Nanabhai was asleep but Ajwali Ba
continued to keep awake even without bothering to close her eyes.
“I see her staring at the sky
enjoying a private game
of untangling the stars
and counting them
into their correct constellations.” 93

Nanabhai Bhatt, Sujata's grandfather was a thinker, writer and

educationist. He participated in freedom struggle under Gandhiji's
leadership. He was a founder of Dakshinamurti in Ambla Bhavnagar
(Gujarat) and later Lokbharti, Sanosara in Gujarat. These educational
institutions are modeled on Gandhian values like Nai Talim, Basic Education
and cultivation of three H's viz., ‘head, heart and hands’. Nanabhai Bhatt in
Prison' reminisces Nanabhai in prison in 1942-43. He was thrown into the

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prison for helping Gandhiji for Civil Disobedience. Then Sujata was in
college, Baltimore, USA reading literature. She pictured Nanabhai in prison
in the middle of the night in the middle of writing. He paused to read from
Tennyson, his favorite poet. The poet wondered which lines of Tennyson
gave him the most comfort as he sat in a dark cell of a prison at the age of
sixty. The poem depicts the poet's admiration and adulation for her
grandfather who lived the life of principles in turbulent times.

Sujata Bhatt in her poem Kankaria Lake describes the famous Kankaria
Lake of Ahmedabad.

“It is more like a skin,

a reptile's skin-
wrinkled and rough as a crocodile's
and green
Bacterial green, decomposed
green- opaque and dull.”

Children imagine that crocodiles devour careless men who sleep to

close to the lake and,
“There are hardly any trees
near the lake; no friendly monkeys
who would throw fruits down
to the crocodiles, as they do
in one old story.” 94

A Different way to Dance and What Happened to the Elephant refers to

Ganesh myth, Ganesh the son of Lord Shiva and Parvati. He is considered
a symbol of wisdom and prudence. Ganesh did not always have an
elephant's head but acquired one after Shiva through a misunderstanding
chopped off his original head. In the poem A Different Way to Dance, Sujata
Bhatt describes a drive South of Boston on her June night when her mother
saw an elephant in a truck. They follow the truck as if they were following

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Lord Ganesh himself. Then the poet imagines Parvati, Ganesh's mother
dreaming of her son's greenish brown eyes, small nose, straight eyebrows,
thick knots of curly hair before Shiva ' interfered'.
“Sometime the elephant head of Ganesh
dreams of the life among elephants it knew
before Shiva interfered.
How comfortable it was to walk
on four legs. To be able to speak with mountains
to guess the mood of the wind..
and there was the jungle,
cool mud, dripping leaves,
the smell of wood-sandal wood and teal.
The smell of trees allowed to grow old
the smell of fresh water touched by deer
the smell of his newly found mate
the smell of their mounting passion...” 95

Sujata Bhatt peeps in to the elephant head of Ganesh who still cherish
the memories of the jungle life among the elephant herd. The poem evokes
highly sensuous images that appeal to readers' senses of touch, hearing,
smell and soon. She returns to the same myth in 'what happened to the
Elephant' where she questions:
“What happened to the elephant
the one whose head Shiva stole
to bring his son Ganesh
back to life?”

She prolongs the story by stretching the child's imagination that

continues to probe deeper. Ganesh become Ganesh with head of elephant
Shiva chopped off but then what happened to the elephant whose head was
chopped off. If the elephant was received with, say, a horse’s head,
“Who is the true elephant?
And what shall we do
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 about the horse’s body?

The child wants solution where none should dies. The poet says that
one imagines a rotting carcass of a beheaded elephant as she looks at the
framed post-card of Lord Ganesh. The elephant invited for Ganesh but the
other elephants danced in sadness round the beheaded elephant.
“How they turned and turned
in a circle, with their trunks
facing outwards and the inwards
towards the headless one.
That is dance
a group dance
no one talks about...” 96

Sujata Bhatt's questioning mode raises deeply curious, intellectual and

sensitive issues. Her poetry thus differs from other Diaspora poets where
one finds a sense of dislocation and displacement from their homeland while
in Sujata Bhatt's poetry, one encounters intellectual inquiry often
metaphysical in nature. Sujata Bhatt describes tails of monkeys as glorious
questions in her poem Understanding the Ramayan.

Deviben Pathak is a poem about Sujata Bhatt's grandmother, her

mother's mother. She remembers the year 1938 when her mother was
twelve years old. Her mother's mother asked the goldsmith to make a
pendent in the shape of Swastika for her. Swastika is a sacred symbol in
India symbolizing triangular Parvati and triangular Shiva. Deviben had never
heard of Hitler's use of swastika for Nazism. Sujata Bhatt was also fond of
Swastika symbols that she drew it them everywhere. However, what shall
she say to her German born daughter?

"Oh, didn't I love the Hindu Swastika?

And later one day didn't I start wishing
I could rescue the shape from History?

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 But how shall I begin?
what shall I say
oh my German-born daughter,
innocent girl with a Lubecker
Baltic-eyed innocent father.”

The poet feels that there is something wrong about many sacred
things. They are not always innocent and holy.
“Something is wrong:
So many old religious fatten
on arrangements, on fresh murders
or do they call that offerings?
Someone's wife, someone' son
should not have been touched...” 97

The poet mixes history, mythology and politics in a very poignant

manner connecting it to memory of her grandmother and her German born
daughter Baltic-eyed husband. There is a tendency on her past to intertwine
the rhythm of vernacular Indian languages Sneh as Gujarati in her poetry in
English. Her multilingual abilities create a very interesting effect. In a poem
White Asparagus, she enters into the consciousness of pregnant women
who erotically relieves her state of sexual fulfillment. She asks: “who
understands the logic behind the desire?”

A Story for Pears is a very touching poem about her grant aunt
Hiraben. She was divorced and started working as a nurse. She was often
seduced by married doctors. Her life was a long, tragic story of sufferings.
The poet says:
“I wonder if she ever
spoke to God
I imagined she would have given up
with a Lord who allows torture
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 And how could she have continued
believing in a God who dwells
in every heart? The Lord
in her mother-in-Law's heart?
The Lord in her husband's heart?”

She felt that her soul had left her. Flowers colors, birdsongs meant
nothing to her. She died a tragic death
“Towards the end
when she was dying
she used to poke her naked chest
with a tired finger
as if to say here here
this is where my soul used to be...” 99

The Echoes in Pune describes how scientists use rhesus monkeys in

search for vaccination and anti-biotic. While the poet's father experimented
with test-tube, her younger brother, a six year old, child feels monkeys with
flowers and berries. After many years, the poet is remained of those
monkeys when her daughter lay hot with fever and tense with anti-biotic.

In Walking Across the Brooklyn Bridge, she remembers the people -

the fathers and mothers from Vietnam who are willing to give their blood,
hair, livers, kidneys to get their children past the statue of liberty. It presents
immigrant's view of subtle form of violence in America.

“In another section

of the Newspaper I read
about the ever growing problems of refuges
who will take them in?
Especially, the ones from Vietnam,
a favorite subject for photographers,
flimsy boats, someone's thin arm in the way -

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 who can forget those eyes?
And who can judge those eyes
that vision?...” 99

Distances expresses Sujata Bhatt's true diasporic and multicultural

sentiment which always insists on embracing universalism and
inclusiveness. The poem in fact, presents her philosophy of acceptance of
the entire world as one, the world beyond borders. Once swimming in the
Atlantic Ocean in Conil, she feels that every place is closer to her.
“Africa, America,
You are not far away
I touch you through the waves
simultaneously –
……………………..
And every place slides
through my fingers with the filthy
just breaking waves, relentless
salty water.” 100

But back out of the ocean again, inland; all is separate, distant. Man
made borders come into existence on land in the atlas.
“and this ocean
lies trapped on the page
like a gasping beached whale.”

Need to recall the Journey is a graphic description of the birth of a child

by the mother. She recalls the experience.

“When she was about to slide out

safely
all by herself - I felt my heart
go half-way out with her.
like seeing a beloved one off

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 to a harbor, to a ship
destined to go
to a far away place
You've never been to...” 101

The mother says that she was lucky to have felt each step. It was a
sharp scalping blackness as if one had swallowed thorns, entire cacti and
splinters from a knife
“Is it how it feels
to be almost drowned?
Black black
that old knowledge
from the earth.
……………………
And then, I was cold,
cold, as if my bones
had been emptied
102
of their marrow.”

At the Flower Market describes the poet and her six month old
daughter's visit to a flower market not to buy flowers but to just to look
around. The poet saw her six mouth old daughter' face and she stared at
colorful flowers. There are explosive hibiscus and bougainvillea, caged in
the plastic pots as they sit like laboratory specimens. She recalls her
bougainvillea at her Pune house, tall and huge like elephant and bracts flying
in the air like paper kites. There were huge hibiscuses in her Pune house
like red trumpets with large golden tongues.

In What Does One Write When the World Starts to Disappear, the poet
imagines rising up of the earth in the form of a woman at the foot hills of the
Himalayas complaining to Shiva that she is unable to bear all those weapons
- swords, gun, missiles, satellites and so on. She requests Lord Shiva to do

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something. Lord Shiva, the God of destruction with seven hooded cobra
paralyzed everything to stillness. The poet asks:
"What would one do
when the words starts to disappear?
where does one go?
what does one take along?
and who will read our books
tomorrow? who will listen
to our music, tune the sitars
and violins?
I mean, what species? 103

The poet imagines that a few lizards and snakes may have managed to
survive. The lizard's tale would be seen dancing through the eyehole of the
mask. The snake forked tongue would investigate the nature of plastic. The
poem exhibits the modern concerns about war and environmental hazards.
The poem possesses universal appeal as it voices the fears of modern world
threatened by violence, terrorism, pollution and plastic. The poet uses the
Vedic myth of the Earth as a women complaining to Lord Shiva along with
scientific terms very deftly.

In The Stinking Rose, Sujata Bhatt explores various mythologies and

magical aspects of garlic in twenty five parts. The stinking rose is one of the
names of garlic. She evokes the hunting memories of India, Europe and
Vancouver Island. There is a dialogue between the new world and the old
intensifying towards the end of the volume in a series of experimental
poems, using Gujarati and English together.

Fate is a poem addressed to A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), the poet

Sujata Bhatt admired the most. The poet comes to know of A.K.
Ramanujan's death while she started rereading his poems unaware that he
was in a hospital in Chicago and Sujata was in Bremen, not knowingly why
she had that sudden craving for his words she says:

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 “Forgive me if I call it fate
or some from telepathy
But very soon the phone rang
at an odd hour with the news
of your death.”

Sujata Bhatt's volume of selected poems Point No Point (1997), which

draws on the first three books would appeal to all those who wish to enter an
unusual imaginative world. She shows her wider understanding and
empathy across cultures and how she enters the world of the artist,
dramatizing the experience of language and its multicultural meanings. Her
particular achievement lies in the fact that though she writes in English, often
dealing with multicultural settings, and themes, retains Indian cultural
richness. Her statement: 'I never left home / I carried it away with me’
exhibits her internationalism with deep sensitivity and human perspectives.
Sujata Bhatt differs from other diasporic poets as her concerns are wider and
all encompassing. Her poetry has instinctive sophistication that confronts
the contradictions in the world of silence and mythologies. There are also
contradictions in her own comparatively orthodox Indian background and
upbringing and her extensive travelling and acquaintance with the modern
world. She cherishes nostalgic memories of her childhood in India, recalling
them again and again in her poetry at the same time, she adapts to new
surroundings in new countries trying to assimilate the best from everywhere.
She loves German landscapes as much as she does the Indian landscapes.
She enjoys and appreciates modern German paintings, music and literature.
She is acquainted with several European and Indian languages that prove
her with true multicultural identity. She is a sensitive, romantic and even
erotic poet with a scientific attitude, wry, wise and searching questioning
stance. Sujata's poetry oscillates between her love, her roots and also a
certain kind of dislike and disagreement with her homeland with its
superstition, poetry, squalor. Brunizem refers to a variety of brown prairies
soil found in Asia, Africa and North America. It becomes an apt metaphor for
dispersal of the self. Thus diaporic poetry is motivated by the sense of
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questioning, analysis and shifting attitude towards the process of immigrant
life and history.

Page 178
 References:

1. Gulzar. Selected Poems. Translated by Pavan K Verma. Penguin,

India. p.46.
2. Tagore, Rabindranath. What is Art? Lectures and Addresses by
Rabindranath Tagore. Mumbai:Macmillan & Co., 1970.p.72.
3. Arnold, Mathew. Study of Poetry. English Critical Tradition. ed. S.
Ramaswami & V.S. Seturaman, Mumbai, Macmillian & Co., 1989. p.44-
46
4. Emerson, R.W. An Emerson Render .ed. by Nissim Ezekiel, Bombay:
Popular Prakashan .1965.p.32.
5. Ibid. p.36.
6. Alexander, Meena, Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003.
p. 73-74.
7. Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003
p.15.
8. Ibid. p.38.
9. Alexander, Meena, River and Bridge. Toronto Tsar Publication, 1996
p.35.
10. Alexander, Meena quoted in Ruth Maxey's interview in Kenyon
Review, New York: February 25 and 28, 2005.
11. Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003
p.284.
12. Fault Lines: 193.
13. Fault Lines: 193.
14. Alexander, Meera. Fault Lines. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003
pp.199-95.
15. Ibid.p.199.
16. Ibid. p. 203.
17. Alexander, Meena. River and Bridge. Toronto: Tsar Publications. 1996.
p.4-5.
18. Ibid p.6.
19. Ibid p.10-11.
Page 179
20. Ibid p.23.
21. Ibid p.24.
22. Ibid p.25.
23. Fault Lines . p.129-130.
24. Fault Lines. p. 131.
25. Alexander, Meena. River and Bridge. Toronto: Tsar Publication, 1996.
p. 29.
26. Ibid p.33.
27. Ibid p. 36.
28. Ibid p.41.
29. Alexander, Meena. Illiterate Heart. 'Fragments'. London: Northwestern
University Press, 2003. p. 27.
30. Ibid. p. 66.
31. Alexander, Meena. River and Bridge. New Delhi: Rupa Publication.
1995. p. 73
32. Ibid. p. 78
33. Ibid.p. 85-86.
34. Ibid. p.86
35. Ibid. p.49.
36. Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines: A Memoir. New York: Feminist Press.
1993. p. 143-146.

37. Alexander, Meena. River and Bridge. New Delhi: Rupa Publication.
1995.p.43.

38. Alexander, Meena. Raw Silk. Illinois: North Western University

Press,2009. p.9.
39. Ibid p.10
40. Ibid p.11
41. Ibid p.14
42. Ibid p.28
43. Ibid p.32
44. Ibid p.32-33
45. Ibid p -36

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46. Ibid p. 38
47. Ibid p.47
48. Ibid. p. 50
49. Ibid. p. 50
50. Ibid. p.65
51. Ibid, p. 67
52. Ibid. p :73
53. Ibid. p. 75
54. Ibid. p.76
55. Ibid. p. 78-79
56. Ibid. p.837
57. Ibid. p -88
58. Ibid. p. 87
59. Meena Alexander- In an interview with Ruth Maxey for Kenyon Review
New York .February 25 & 28, 2005.
60. Meena Alexander in interview with Lopamudra Basu, New York –
January, 2002.
61. Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines: A Memoir. New York: Feminist Press,
1993. p.260.
62. Bhatt, Sujata. The One who Goes Away. Point No Point. Manchester:
Carcanet: 1997.p. 23.
63. Ibid p. 27.
64. Bhatt, Sujata. History is a Broken Narrative. Augatora. New York:
Carcanet, 2000.p. 40-41.
65. Ibid. p. 41
66. Ibid. p.43.
67. Ibid. p.16.
68. Ibid. p.45.
69. Bhatt, Sujata. A Different History. Brunizem. New York: Carcanet,
1988.p.47.

70. Ibid. p.48.

71. Ibid.p.52.

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72. Ibid. p.52.
73. Bhatt, Sujata. Augatora. New York: Carcanet, 2000. p.15.
74. Ibid. p.16.
75. Ibid. p.20.
76. Bhatt, Sujata. History is a Broken Narrative. Augatora. New York:
Carcanet, 2000. p.34.
77. Ibid. p.38-39.
78. Ibid. p. 40.
79. Ibid. p. 40.
80. Ibid. p.45.
81. Ibid. p.55.
82. Ibid. p.57.
83. Ibid. p.57-59.
84. Ibid. p. 106.
85. Ibid. p.91.
86. Ibid. p. 97.
87. Ibid. p. 98.
88. Ibid. p.100-103.
89. Ibid. p.106-107.
90. Ibid. p.106.
91. Bhatt, Sujata. Monkey Shadows. New York: Carcanet, 2001. p.13-15.
92. Ibid. p. 16-19.
93. Ibid. p. 26.
94. Ibid. p. 31.
95. Ibid. p. 35.
96. Ibid. p. 37-38.
97. Ibid. p. 50.
98. Ibid. p. 69-70.
99. Ibid. p. 85.
100. Ibid.p.100.
101. Ibid. p.110.
102. Ibid. p. 101-102.
103. Ibid. p.120-121.
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