Immigrant Site and Matrilineage in Meena Alexander’s River and Bridge

Immigrant Site and Matrilineage in Meena Alexander’s River and Bridge

S.PRABAKAR.                                         Dr.V.NAGARAJAN    

Ph.D. Research Scholar,                                                Associate Professor & Head

AlagappaGovt Arts College                                         AlagappaGovt Arts College

Karaikudi                                                                       Karaikudi

            MeenaAlexander,is one of the prominent writers of Indian Writing in English. Her poems cover various issues that haunt the Diaspora like rootlessness, restlessness, the alienated self and the socio political boundaries that divide, the problems of existential crisis, discrimination and the quest for identity. The theme of displacement, race -relations and a strong craving for re-identifications, is the staple-stuff of most of  Meena Alexander's poems. The term displacement is intimately associated with diaspora and its has got its poignancy in the hands ofMeena Alexander's .Diaspora literally means a minority community living in exile either by choice or by force of the socio,political and economic factors. As a result of this displacement, harsh journey are undertaken, relationships are lost, homes are deserted and a strong desire to survive begins to take over. Despite the longing to go back to the original homeland, the physical, social and political boundaries force the diaspora to quest for the common characteristics and arrives at compromises that may suit them best to survive in the foreign land. In this paper an attempt has been made to study the quest for their true identity to find a personal significance and meaning in their profession, family and ultimately in the society.

            Alexander finds appropriate for her purpose, the analogy of the geographical fault a fracture in the earth’s crust causing displacement in its layer.The fault metaphor coveys effectively the condition of cultural break and the coming into being of a new identity which does not fit neatly together into a homogeneous self.

             In River and Bridge Alexander’s poems raise thematic and ideological issues about  the return to Indian roots in pure form,the marginal self who interweaves through both Indian culture .Problems of the containment of the Indian imagination in an alien landscape are  sounded out in the poem ‘’Relocation”

 The mind held in a metallic fork

 Its sense  inviolate, the questions of

Travel scored by icy borders

The imagination ordering itself.(16)

Alexander’s narrator asks in “Brown Skin, What Mask?:Shall I be a hyphenated thing ,Macaulay’s Minutes and Melting Pot theories not withstanding”

            In River and Bridge” there is an acceptance of the idea that ‘birth’ in this case rebirth of a new identity, is won with difficulty: A new life –choice, a remaking of identity is projected in hopeful, positive terms in these lines from the  same lines poem:

              I have come to the Hudson’s edge to begin my life

To be born again ,to seep as water might

In a landscape of mist, burnished trees,

A bridge that seizes crossing.(25)

           

In the composition of a matrilineage ,the presence of female deities or superwoman are invoked as bearers of moral strength and wisdom .In “San Andreas Fault”, the atrocities of war weather in Sarajevo or new Germany or contemporary India are witnessed through the consciousness of Kali ,Durga and Draupadi:

 Female still,quite metamorphic

I flowed into Kali ivory tongued

Skills nipping my breasts

Durga lips etched with wires

Astride and electric tiger

Draupadi born of flame betrayed by five brothers

Stripped of skills in the banquet hall of shame.

In the ghostly lights of those women’s eyes

I saw the death camps at our century’s end (32)

            The delineation of matrilinage is given a more radical feminist thrust in Alexander’s Blood Line” .The narrator of “Blood Line” speaks about both continuity and change, the older generation and the new one, and how she (the narrator),serves as the bridge in between .the poem opens with a dedication –for Savati Miriam ,one year old” and traces the  different sensibilities and selves of here generations of women.

            Alexander’s poems initiate movement towards a new perception of women and a romantic reconnection with the famine unconscious as an agency of spiritual restoration.

            Alexander along with the recall of an older cultural identity trough resources of memory ,language, story and myth (cent red in mothers) their poetry expresses a new birthing of identity from their value domain as diasporic daughters of Mother’s India

                                                WORKS CITED

Primary Source

Alexander,Meena .River and Bridge. New Delhi:Rupa&Co ,1995.