Illiterate Heart

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander (17 Februa1951- 21 Nov 2018), poet, essayist, novelist, and
scholar, died in New York City on November 21 after a courageous battle with cancer. She
was Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Hunter College and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Alexander was one of the most
accomplished poets of postcolonial India. She remained deeply connected in her writing to
her Indian and particularly Kerala roots, while representing a cosmopolitan sensibility, one
that had been nurtured in India, Sudan, England, and her final home since 1980s, the island of
Manhattan. Her poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between the worlds of memory
and the present, enhanced by multiple languages. Her experience of exile is translated into the
intimate exploration of her connections to both India and America. Drawing on the
fascinating images and languages of her dual life, Alexander deftly weaves together
contradictory geographies, thoughts, and feelings. Her text is poetic and sensual, contending
with large themes incorporating bigotry, violence, fanaticism and interracial tensions.

Alexander was best-known for her award-winning collections of poetry Illiterate

Heart (2002) and Raw Silk (2004); the former won the 2002’s PEN Book Award. Her
autobiographical memoir, Fault Lines was originally published in 1993 and was later revised
in 2003 with new material. It was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of
1993. Her two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music were also widely accepted by
readers. Her other poems have appeared in global publications like The New Yorker, Harvard
Review, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review and various other journals. Meena Alexander’s
collection of poems Illiterate Heart is a tribute to her father who was a meteorologist. It is a
collection of 34 poems where Alexander uses fragments of expressions from many languages
including French, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Sanskrit, Bangla and Malayalam-her own mother
tongue. She was deeply influenced by the British Romantic poets whom she studied in her
youth, but she struggled to accommodate this aesthetic into the development of her own
poetic voice. In many of her poems, she returns to the theme of the burdens imposed by
colonial language and pedagogy in the representation of her experiences as a female
postcolonial poet.
The Poem

I.

One summer holiday I returned

to the house where I was raised.
Nineteen years old, I crouched
on the damp floor where grandfather’s
library used to be, thumbed through
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
thinking why should they imagine no one else
has such rivers in their lives?

I was Marlowe and Kurtz and still more

a black woman just visible at the shore.
I thought it’s all happened, all happened before.

So it was I began, unsure of the words

I was to use still waiting for a ghost
to stop me crying out:
You think you write poetry! Hey you –

as he sidestepped me dressed neatly

in his kurta and dhoti,
a mahakavi from the temples of
right thought.

Or one in white flannels

unerringly English, lured from Dove Cottage ,
transfixed by carousels of blood ,
Danton’s daring, stumbling over stones
never noticing his outstretched
hand passed through me.

II.

How did I come to this script?

Amma taught me from the Reading Made Easy
books , Steps 1 & 2 pointed out Tom and Bess
little English children
sweet vowels of flesh they mouthed to perfection:
aa ee ii oouu a(apple) b(bat) c(cat) d(dat)
Dat? I could not get, so keen the rhymes made me,
sense overthrown.
Those children wore starched knicker
bockers or sailor suits and caps ,
waved Union Jacks,
tilted at sugar beets.

O white as milk
their winding sheets!

I imagined them dead all winter

packed into icicles,
tiny and red, frail homunculus each one
sucking on alphabets.

Amma took great care with the books,

wrapped them in newsprint lest something
should spill, set them on the rosewood sill.
When wild doves perched they shook
droplets from quicksilver wings
onto fading covers.

The books sat between Gandhi’s Experiments

with Truth and a minute crown of thorns
a visiting bishop had brought.

He told us that the people of Jerusalem

spoke many tongues including Arabic, Persian
Syriac as in our liturgy, Aramaic too.

Donkeys dragged weights through tiny streets.

Like our buffaloes, he laughed.
I had to perform my Jana GanaMana for him
and Wordsworth’s daffodil poem —

the latter I turned into a rural terror

my version of the chartered streets.

III.

What beats in my heart? Who can tell?

I cannot tease my writing hand around
that burnt hole of sense, figure out the
quickstep 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.

Letters grew fins and tails.

Swords sprang from the hips of consonants,
vowels grew ribbed and sharp.
Pages bound into leather
turned the color of ink.

My body flew apart :

wrist, throat, elbow, thigh,
knee where a mole rose,
bony scapula, blunt cut hair,

then utter stillness as a white sheet

dropped on nostrils and neck.

Black milk of childhood drunk

and drunk again!

I longed to be like Tom and Bess

dead flat on paper.

IV.

At noon I burrowed through

Malayalam sounds,
slashes of sense, a floating trail.

Nights I raced into the garden.

Smoke on my tongue, wet earth

from twisted roots of banyan
and fiscusIndica.

What burnt in the mirror

of the great house
became a fierce condiment.
A metier almost:

aa i ii u uu au um aha kakh
gaghanga cha chhajajanja

njana (my sole self), njaman (knowledge)

nunni (gratitude) ammechi, appechan,
veliappechan (grandfather).

Uproar of sense, harsh tutelage:

aana (elephant) amma (tortoise)
ambjuan (lotus).

A child mouthing words

to flee family.

I will never enter that house I swore,

I’ll never be locked in a cage of script.
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
I committed that to memory,
later added : ce lieu me plaît
dominé de flambeaux.

V.

In dreams I was a child babbling

at the gate splitting into two,
three to make herself safe.

Grown women combing black hair

in moonlight by the railroad track,
stuck forever at the accidental edge.

O the body in parts,

bruised buttress of heaven!
she cries,

a child in a village church

clambering into embroidered vestements
to sing at midnight a high sweet tune.

Or older now
musing in sunlight
combing a few white strands of hair.

To be able to fail.
To set oneself up
so that failure is also possible.

Yes,
that too
however it is grasped.

The movement towards self definition.

A woman walking the streets,
a woman combing her hair.

Can this make music in your head?

Can you whistle hot tunes
to educate the barbarians?

These lines took decades to etch free,

the heart’s illiterate,
the map is torn.

Someone I learn to recognise,

cries out at Kurtz, thrusts skulls aside,
lets the floodwaters pour.
Analysis
“Illiterate Heart” is intensely autobiographical poems that explore the foreign and the
familiar; Alexander's poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between two worlds,
between memory and present-day experience, and literature by multiple languages. She
captures the alienation between her intellectual legacy of British modernism and her lived
realities in the poem. Alexander exposes the violence of colonial pedagogy through the
imposition of a colonial language.

In the poem, the movement towards self definition, the conspiciousness of the I, is
fully realised. She is closer to the reader. In Illiterate Heart, Meena Alexander gives us the
latest contribution to post colonial women’s lyric poetry. By sorting out the menacing
problem of lyrical illiteracy for the postcolonial migrant woman-the unavailability of the
terrain of self for one caught in the snare of colonial and patriarchal language-the “I” is
materialized with new frankness. In “Illiterate Heart” the formation of identity through
language within conditions of patriarchy and colonization is vividly illustrated. Alexander
exposes the violence of colonial pedagogy through the imposition of a colonial language.
`The twofold tyranny of colonization and patriarchy is rendered in the poem “Illiterate
Heart”.

The poem “Illiterate Heart” presents the detail accounts of how poetry came to her.
The poet exiled from the place of origin compares herself with Marlow and Kurtz in “Heart
of Darkness”. It suggests poet’s groping in the field of poetry, unsure of words. She acquired
the script of English instead of Malayalam. The sense of exile and loss comes out of her
separation from the mother tongue by the dead script of English. Alexander exposes the
violence of colonial pedagogy through the imposition of a colonial language. Alexander
expresses her ambiguous relationship with her mother tongue Malayalam, her refusal to learn
its formal script, even when the music of her poetry in English is indelibly marked by the
rhythms of the oral Malayalam traditions that she grew up amidst. Her relationship with the
English language is also marked by a profound sense of racial and cultural alienation that she
feels as a child when introduced to the characters of Tom and Bess in the Reader.

In the poem, Alexander speaks of ‘split-consciousness or double consciousness.’ She

is literally torn between two different worlds, languages and cultures.Alexander is referring to
her split state consciousness or living through the animals used for transport in Jerusalem and
India and the national identity through Indian national anthem and the English poet’s nature
poem especially the geographical element of a nation. Both the nations are geopolitically and
geographically vary in every aspect but Alexander is geo-emotionally split between these two
nations with double consciousness.

The poetry is always beating in her heart and the writing can provide solace to her
burnt sense. Her words are influenced by Gandhi, Marx and Gospels but violence involved in
using and learning English. It is expressed very bitterly as “Black milk of childhood drunk /
and drunk again”. During English lessons as a child, Alexander reflects, “My body flew
apart: / wrist, throat, elbow, thigh, / . . . Then utter stillness as a white sheet / dropped on
nostrils and neck”. Historically, colonization is enforced through pedagogy – through the
compulsory acquisition of a colonial language which metaphorically “breaks up” the
subject’s body and her sense of self.

The child of the poem must navigate multiple languages: "At noon I burrowed
through / Malayalam sounds, / slashes of sense, a floating trail". She weaves letters of the
English alphabet seamlessly into Malayalam letters and words. By recreating the process of
introduction to languages, Malayalam, her mother tongue, and English, the language of her
creative expression, Alexander offers us an insight into her hybrid literary lineage, which is
responsible for an innovative poetic form that juxtaposes words from two of her most
intimate languages. However, as the poetic passage develops, it is obvious that this hybrid
poetic form and this innovation exist intimately with the alienation produced by the colonial
experience of loss of a native language and culture and a violent imposition of an alien
language. It is the “harsh tutelage” of the colonial pedagogy that the poet writes of inorder to
free self and reader from that “cage of script.”She shows how colonial and Postcolonial
subjects are made, violated and trapped by language, how language inscribes identity and
breaks it apart.

The poet babbles in her dreams to make herself safe from the splitting of the worlds
and sings at midnight a high sweet tune to save herself from the failures. Thus poetry
becomes “The movement towards self definition”. Three languages loom large in the poet’s
self and psyche – English, French and Malayalam. The self fashioned here is inseparable
from her native and colonial languages, “. . . Stuck forever at the accidental edge. // O the
body in parts, / bruised buttress of heaven!”. However, by using these languages, by creating
poetry with them, she binds body and self into a unified whole. Returning to a familiar trope
in her work – birth – we see that language is both “painful” and “heavenly” since it is
inscribed violently through dominating forces and is the means by which the self is
conceived, written, revealed: born.Though grownup in reason, Alexander clearly states that
she is trapped between once- upon- a- time memories of childhood or revisited life and newly
acquired lifestyle.In spite of the poet’s effort to etch her fantasies through poetry the heart
remains illiterate because of the burden of language and “the map is torn”.

Exile and loss, memoir of past and quest for identity are the major themes of the
poem. Alexander’s practice of melding fragments of various languages in her poems reflected
a commitment to cultural syncretism in India and in the US.

Theme

Quest for identity: Identity is seen as a major theme in her most of the poems
including “Illiterate Heart”. The search for identity can be seen as a dominant theme in the
poems of Meena Alexander, as she progresses through memories of the past, drawing on a
multitude of images and languages. The writer presents the feelings of confusion, alienation
and a sense of disconnect while struggling to define her past and present, perplexed by
change, on a journey towards the true self.

Questions

1. Explain the line “I longed to be like Tom and Bess dead flat on paper”.
2. Why does Alexander say that she is trapped in between the memories of her
childhood?
3. Comment on the line “the map is torn”.