Remembering Meena Alexander

Valladares remembers Meena Alexander. Alexander's art and scholarship on dislocation/migration/postcolonial aesthetics and identity flowed into the stream of discourse on voices from the South Asian diaspora. For the immigrant, artist of color who is invisible--a ghost in America--Alexander proposed reentry in a new identity. Poetry with its transmutation and transformation of images and ideas was her perfect vehicle. Despite her fluency in several languages and her love for her mother tongue, Malayalam, she established herself as a writer in English due to circumstance and colonization in both India and Sudan. At fifteen she changed her name to Meena from her baptized name of Mary Elizabeth. In Khartoum while at university, her first published poems written in English were published in Arabic. Despite writing in the colonizer's tongue, Alexander came to treasure the nuances of the languages of her childhood, Malayalam and Arabic.