In an excerpt from her autobiography, Fault Lines, Meena Alexander shares with
her readers her shaken identity from a first person point of view. With a dismal tone she
uses figurative language, stream of consciousness, and rhetorical questions to bring the
reader face to face with her reality as a "woman cracked between multiple migrations."
Meena feels that because she has lived in several different places throughout her
life and lived several different lives, speaking several different languages that she has
ultimately become "multiple being locked into the journeys of one body." She briefly talks
about the difficulty she has looking into a mirror and seeing her crooked "flesh thrown
back at the eyes", which is a negative way of confirming that she is of Asian decent. She
breaks off from her mirror tangent into a stream of consciousness in which her different
beings inside her speak together in a building raucous of voices. This is where the reader
first gets a taste of the theme of a collaborated person torn in different directions by her
Alexander then gives example of the cities and languages that she has come across,
after first questioning the usefulness of these souvenirs she has to remind her of where
she's been. From the quote "my life did not fall into the narratives I had been taught to
honor" the reader gets a scence of the skewed life she leads, lacking background and
culture. And then she reveals a symbolic fantasy she has of being a bud on a "well rooted
[tree] in a sweet perpetual place," The tree symbolizing the grounded life she wish she
Her passage features intertextuality when she says "I sit here writing," she
obviously uses this to add to the dreariness of her tone, and then lists the questions that
she'd like answered in order for her to feel like she belonged, following them up
...