Introduction

Creative writing has always been influenced by socio-political changes.

These changes could be envisaged in the subjective perspective of ‘home,’

‘space,’ and gender, and in the broader sphere of political impact of events that

mark the various phases of a nation’s history. The chequered history of

colonialism in India has engendered a postcolonial re-vision of ‘home,’ and

‘place’ / ‘space’ in the writing that has been popularly bisected as the regional

and English by scholars like K.R.S.Iyengar (12), Meenakshi Mukherjee (78),

K.Ayyappa Paniker, (11), and K.Satchidanandan (19). The social mobility of

the post-Independence population abetted by the fast pace of technology in the

various spheres of postcolonial life has recast ‘space’ beyond physical or

geographical boundaries. Tradition and hierarchical values have loosened their

grip on creative writing in the ‘melting pot’ of cultures and values. Ideologies

fashioned by race, caste, and sex are being critiqued by the liberating forces of

cultural hybridity and feminism. Caught between the interface of the past and

the present is a new generation of writers who attempt to re-set the social

system in new perspectives.

Indian English writing is a colourful spectrum of poetry, drama and

prose fiction, which spans the transition of India from the colonial to the

postcolonial. It is a complex interweaving of the Indian experience, with its

regional involvements and international affiliations made possible through

English, and enriched by the diasporic experiences of writers not confined

geographically to India. Modern Indian poetry finds one of its authentic voices

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in English. The new poets write in English, aware of the powerful oral presence

of their mother tongues. Yet, deep down resides the knowledge of a past

filtering into the present, a persistent ache that resolves into a creative dialogue

between the ‘self’ and the ‘other.’ Experience and language criss-cross into a

pattern of voice and silence. Charismatic figures like Tagore, Aurobindo and

Sarojini Naidu dominated the literary scene before the Independence and

experimented with the English language with vigour and patriotic zeal to

express not only their subjectivity but also the total aspiration of India. By the

turn of the sixties, a powerful surge of modernism swept aside the romantic and

spiritual poetry to re-form creative writing into the experimental terse verse of

Nissim Ezekiel, A.K.Ramanujan, Keki Daruwalla, and the vehement outburst

of female subjectivity of Kamala Das.

The writing of the seventies and the eighties reinforced this linguistic

concern, an almost obsessive preoccupation with the language, as revealed in

Meena Alexander’s anxiety of being caught between the “terror of babble” and

the “terror of nonsense” (“Exiled by a Dead Script” 1). K.R.S.Iyengar finds in

postcolonial poetry an overt lingering on the bi-cultural act of writing in

English rather than on the need to communicate any perception. Quoting

Meenakshi Mukherjee to underline his point, he adds that “… these poems owe

their origin to the poets’ response to the English language rather than to the

urgent need to communicate a perception” (709). Language becomes a crucial

matter in woman writing as it boils down to its very existence as an authentic

literature. Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” is a remarkable challenge thrown to

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literary convention, and the first powerful female voice to sound the hitherto

voiceless female subjectivity:

… Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak.

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses.

All mine, mine alone. (6-9)

English becomes her language, identity and space, and the strident call for

linguistic experimentation matures into an intuitive grasp of language.

‘Kerala’ as a discourse accommodates disparate voices, versions and re-

definitions in the ‘bhasha’ and English writing, thereby contesting a restrictive

categorization and a unified voice. ‘Keralam’ in Malayalam poetry fans out as

the poet’s sense of tradition and culture, an acute awareness of contemporary

issues like the Dalit and woman identity in the socio-economic and literary

spheres, the escalating ecological imbalances, the dwindling of familial ties in

the growing consumerist society, re-creation of myths and legends, and the

vibrant rhythm of her folk art. ‘Keralam,’ the palmyra fan with its undulating

surface, enfolds and releases the cool freshness of poetic sensibility in

Malayalam literature.

The diasporic experience is not new to Kerala, its heritage being

enriched by the confluence of many cultures, Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Christian,

Jewish, and Buddhist. The shift from the linguistic to the diasporic in creative

writing marks a pronounced tendency to ‘image’ Kerala, or the ‘home’ left

behind. The bi-cultural act of adopting English as the language of creative

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writing has engendered the issues of representation and authenticity.

Meenakshi Mukherjee observes “the anxiety of Indianness” haunting the Indian

writers in English (78). Yet, as K. Satchidanandan avers, “we are living at a

time when the idea of “Indianness” is being interrogated from different

perspectives,” the essentialist concept giving way to “a more federal

democratic perspective of a polyphonic India, a mosaic of cultures, languages,

literatures and world-views” (19). The post-Independence migrations within

and outside India have generated a particular kind of knowledge born of a

tension between the newness of what is being made and an older way that

resists its emergence. According to Ayyappa Paniker, “to be Indian, {the

writer} has to be rooted somewhere in India, geographically, historically,

socially or psychologically” (11).

The present thesis focuses on two poets from Tiruvalla, Kerala--Anna

Sujatha Mathai (b.1936), and Meena Alexander (b.1951). Belonging to the Mar

Thoma community of Tiruvalla, they have carved out a niche for themselves in

Indian writing in English. Anna Sujatha Mathai, an extensively travelled poet,

is settled in New Delhi. She has been publishing poetry for more than three

decades and has four volumes of poetry to her credit--Crucifixions (1970), We

The Unreconciled (1972), The Attic of Night (1991), and Life- On My Side of

the Street and Other Poems: Dialogue and Other Poems By Priya Sarukkai

Chabria (2005). Born outside Kerala, she studied at the Universities of Delhi,

Edinburgh, Bangalore and Minnesota. Her mother tongue is Malayalam, but

her writing is confined to English. She has taught at Delhi University and had

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been involved with the theatre. Her poems have been translated into several

European and Indian languages, and she has given poetry-reading sessions at

various places, including The House of Culture, Stockholm, and the Danish

Writers Union Copenhagen. She has also worked as professional social worker

in England and the United States. Her latest collections of poems, written over

the last decade reveal a “struggle to find meaning and illumination in dark and

difficult years” (“Introduction,” Daruwalla x). K.R.S. Iyengar includes her with

other poets like Sunita Jain, Rina Sodhi and Meena Alexander in his

comprehensive study of Indian Writing in English (728). In the Introduction to

her latest collection of poems (Life- On My Side of the Street and Other

Poems: Dialogue and Other Poems), Daruwalla calls her poems “lyrical and

meditative at the same time” and draws the reader’s attention to the fluency,

effortlessness and cadence in her poetry. Though Daruwalla calls her “a

painter of bleak landscapes,” he discovers an inner strength in her poems (ix-x).

The delicate shades of emotions that enhance her poems are tinged deeply with

the experience of life’s bitter moments. This curious blend of the light and dark

nuances of life creates a flow of visuals that derive their clarity from her

“imaginative reservoir” of her childhood spent in Tiruvalla with her maternal

grandparents. She refers to those years as “a precious and central part of my

imaginative reservoir” (Letter).

Her earliest collection of poems, Crucifixions, is a tentative search into

the ephemeral nature of human life beset by loneliness and suffering. The thirty

poems are thematically structured as subjective musings on the ruptures and the

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healing affected by the inherent note of sensitivity and spirituality in worldly

transactions. Love and compassion transmute her moments of aching loneliness

and desolateness into a glowing vision of humanism--“And all this because,

suddenly, / In a dead world / Love seems possible” (“The Heart’s Landscape”

11-13). The relentless flow of time invests each moment with pristine clarity

and significance. “Our Todays” is a clear explication of the relevance of the

present despite the teeming rush of memories that threaten to congeal Time.

“Each day carries all the reality / of our life” (1-2). Yet, the poet-mind,

unwilling to withstand the torrent of the memory of a lost love is willing to get

submerged in its “gray waves.” Love moves from the very intimate zone of

relationship to the wide terrain of understanding sympathy for all creatures.

Yet, even in such moments of deep fulfillment, the heart pulsates with the

knowledge of the transitoriness of joy. The bubble of passion bursts into

nothingness. The reader senses the tension between the instinctive surrender to

the vital memories of love and the philosophical detachment to the seething

flow of life- The poems pulsate with an acute understanding of “our common

womanhood,” the “tight-budded, anguish touched” that is denied “the relief of

falling petals.” The dominant mood of loneliness and pain is coloured by the

Christian faith in the purgative power of suffering is expressed in the following

lines: “Our common destiny of pain / Makes each of us part of the other”

(“Pain” 13-14). Worldliness rests heavy on the palpitating sensitivity of the ‘I’,

that awaits the “flame that purifies, / Melting away the dross” (“The Song of

the Crucible” 11-12). The poet- mind exults in the deep knowledge of spiritual

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tranquility, for “My spirit has its own clear streams it walks beside / I have

known creation of another kind”(“Creativity” 18-19). The protagonist traces

the path of the Crucifixion in the travails of daily life, for Christ is being

crucified everyday in every street. The first collection of poems carries the

strain of gentle melancholy and compassionate understanding of the spiritual

value of suffering. The strong Christian undertone in her poems, underline the

Mar Thoma faith in the Crucifix and the adherence to simplicity and directness

of prayers, without the intercession of saints.

Her second collection of poems We The Unreconciled contain an insight

born of life experience and philosophic musings. The thirty-three poems carry

the burden of loneliness, pain and death, unrelieved by human understanding

and compassion. The sombre mood persists in all the poems, with the poet

trying to unravel the enigma of human nature. The title poem juxtaposes the

response of Nature and the human world to the evanescent life. Nature, in all

her glory, partakes of joy and pain, the light and the dark of our brief existence.

Flowers struggle “from the dark under ground roots” to fade petal by petal.

Yet, we remain “unreconciled” to the harsh terrain of life. The poet prays for a

glimmer of grace to touch the human race, struggling on its life-journey. The

poet mind takes unpredictable detours into the core of human existence,

aspiring for a glimpse of total understanding that can pierce through the rubble

of desolateness and suffering.

Mathai’s poems are “quiet questionings” trickling into the poetic

sensibility of contemporary times. They ‘converse’ with the reader in non –

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intrusive, smoothly flowing narratives and short lyrical flights. Gopal Gandhi

observes a strain of genetic memory in her third collection of poems, The Attic

of Night. The poems, according to him underscore “unself-consciously” the

Syrian Christian personality of Kerala, which is very important segment of

Kerala (3). The Attic of Night also claims attention for its restraint that comes

from a preference for stillness and contemplation. The book of thirty-nine

poems opens the door to a variety of experiences tinged by the darkness of

night and the tender glow of love. They are the ‘night- visions’ of life, bathed

in the soft waves of darkness, piercing the lurid brightness of the day with the

steady faith in the gift of life and love.

Night, an envelope the lover seals.

Blotting out all evil presences.

Laughter, gifted by gods, cuts through darkness.

Silence, white nights, …

………………………………………………..

Lost night, draw over your quilt of compassion.

Woman, in the attic of night,

Burn your dead.

(“Night and the Children of the Slums” 7-10, 18-20)

The stirrings of primal beauty and strength erode and vanquish the pale

sophistry of civilization. The visions of beauty and terror haunting both the

poet and the reader are suggested subtly in: “Silent we stood / trapped by an

unknown magic” (“Night of Karthika Poornima” 1–2). The book is a journey

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into the “jungle / in my own heart” (“The lost centuries” 24 – 25), observing

and enacting the heat and cold of life experiences. The luminous night, “a

flower of great beauty” is also a witness to the throbbing pain of desolateness

that follows stolen moments of ardour, and the cruel estrangement from the

warmth of love.

Meena Alexander born in Allahabad, educated in Sudan and Britain, and

settled in New York with her family, works both at Hunter College and the

Graduate Center of the City University of New York as the Professor of

English and Creative Writing. Her work has featured widely in India, the

United States and England and has been translated into several languages

including Italian and German. She has many collections of poetry, fiction and

non-fictional works to her credit. Her literary career began early at the tender

age of ten, when she began writing poetry. Her writing spans a variety of

literary genres, though her poetry might be considered her best known work.

Her first book, a single lengthy poem, entitled The Bird’s Bright Ring was

published in 1976 in Calcutta. Since then, Alexander has published more than

ten collections of poems, including prose pieces, two novels, a memoir and a

critical work on Romanticism.

Alexander has established herself as a well-known Asian American poet

in the United States, creatively involved in the postcolonial discourse of

identity, language and gender. Her writing also contributes to the continuity of

Indian writing in English. Deeply interested in a phenomenological study of

poetry, she identifies the in-explicable relation of self and the world at large, as

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one of her major concerns in her creative writing. Situating her as a woman

poet of south Kerala and an Asian immigrant in America, one encounters issues

relevant to both Indian writing in English and postcolonial writing. She brings

to her writing a vast range of experiences. Her poetry and fiction are born out

of this multiplicity, and is the product of the tension resulting from the variety

of environments in which she has lived and about which she writes. In her

writing, powerful images wrought out of her memories of Kerala, interweave

themselves with evocative pictures of the Hudson River, the roaring subways

and the noisy bus traffic of New York City. She moves back and forth in her

writing between these disparate places using material offered by the fragments

of her experience. The tension arising out of this variety, along with the

pressure of the present, combine to mould her expression.

More than a journey back ‘home’, writing offers a legitimate space for

the immigrant writer to encounter and come to terms with ‘otherness.’ Cast into

a strange, new setting, the creative self has to respond to the query ‘who am I?’

juxtaposed with ‘who are they?’ She raises a cardinal question: “What I be to

myself, in a simpler, clearer time, in my mother’s house in Tiruvalla, in a small

town in central Travancore? Was there a sense in which this question could be

anything more than merely nostalgic?” in her prose piece “The Poem’s Second

life: Writing and Self-Identity” (80). One cannot take this as a mere musing and

wishful thought of the poet. On the other hand, it suggests a new perspective

and reading of her writing. She calls herself “a woman cracked by multiple

migrations” in her memoir Fault Lines (3). Naming and structuring the

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complex migrant experience, the poet undergoes a journey into herself. She

enters the realm of a larger shared truth in her encounter with the other Euro -

Asian immigrants. The hyphenated self finds moorings in the multiple

anchorages experiencing a rich and vivid sense of space that cannot be named

by a single language. It amounts to reading the past against the grain. Her

memoir not only unravels her past but also highlights the themes that occur in

her poetry. Alexander attempts to forge a sense of identity, despite the

overpowering impact of dislocation. Thus, her writing revolves round the

theme of establishing an identity independent of the surroundings. The title of

her memoir, Fault Lines, contests boundaries and self-definition. She tries to

define herself, realizing that the making of identity is a process that cannot be

categorized rigidly: “I am a poet writing in America. But American poet?… An

Asian American poet then?… A woman poet, a woman poet of colour, a South

Indian woman who makes up lines in English. A Third World woman poet...?”

(Fault Lines 193). Alexander searches for her own identity in a world that

strives to define, identify, and label people. These definitions of race and

nationality prove difficult to define. Some of the images used in Fault Lines

surface in her poetry. “No man’s land” is a particularly poignant image that

stems from growing up in more than two places, whereby boundaries get

blurred. In her long poem Night- Scene, The Garden these images are very

strong:

No man’s land

No woman’s either

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I stand in the middle of my life… (“Night-Scene” 5-8)

Alexander’s poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between two

worlds, between memory and present day experience, lit by multiple languages.

Drawing on the fascinating images and languages that her dual life has given

her, Alexander deftly joins together contradictory geographies, thoughts and

feelings. Her wanderings between her adult life and the territory of her

childhood are unusual in that they offer a fresh approach to the autographical

element in her poetry. Alexander’s migratory memory is unceasingly inventive:

she looks back upon the landscapes, languages and the events of her childhood

weaving them together with her experiences of present day life in her verse.

The present thesis titled “Configuration of Space in the Poetry of

Meena Alexander and Anna Sujatha Mathai” branches out into three chapters--

Making up Memory: The Spacing of Time, Writing Identity, and The Poetics

of Return--as a tentative search into the dynamics of spatial configurations in

their writing. The study charts the creative course through the labyrinth of

memory, the lifeline along which the dissociated individual could be pulled

back to her real self. Memories play truant, and new space is created in the

interstices of forgetfulness. The re-forming of new space involves the dialectics

of language and representation. Though Mathai and Alexander belong to the

Mar Thoma community of Tiruvalla in south Kerala, they represent realities

that are part of their awareness of the contemporary world. This awareness is

sequential to their distinctive experiences relating to ‘place,’ ‘family,’ and

‘selfhood.’ The question of uprootedness and dislocation, along with the

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growing estrangement experienced in contemporary society by the individual

affect their poetic sensibility and writing. It is also marked by the generational

difference, in relation to a growing contemporary awareness of postcoloniality

and the uprootedness of the diaspora. Alexander represents the post-

Independence generation of immigrant academics settled in the U.S. Her

writing blends with her teaching career in the New York University; and her

poetry and prose pieces reflect her ‘postcolonial’ subjectivity, replenished by

her vast reading, doctoral research in the Romantics, and a keen awareness of

theoretical concerns.

Her writing stems from the complex site of diasporic experience, and

develops through an incessant unmaking and remaking of new space-time.

Informed by migrant sensibility, she envisages an Asian-American aesthetic, an

oppositional stance that can also easily accommodate the complexity of the

Asian-American experience. Drawing on the fascinating images and languages

that her dual life has given her, Alexander deftly joins together contradictory

geographies, thoughts and feelings. Her migratory memory is unceasingly

inventive: she looks back upon the landscapes, languages and events of her

childhood and youth, weaving them together with her American life in the

fierce, beautiful music of her verse. Steering clear of chaos of memory, she

creates poems that are powerful in both their grief and their celebration, and in

which speech and silence coexist as she searches for a clearer perspective of the

past and the present. She threshes out issues of language, identity and creativity

in her poems and prose pieces with the confidence of a brilliant academician

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and teacher. Open to the post- structuralist notions of language and reality, and

the feminist concept of identity, Alexander’s writing flows steadily,

accumulating new graces to culminate in the ‘poetics of return.’ Memory plays

a vital role in creating the past and rewriting personal history, to cushion the

cultural shock of “multiple leave takings” (Fault Lines 191). Memory becomes

the framework to relocate space and time on imagined realities. The issues of

identity and language are knit into the postcolonial fabric of her American

present.

Mathai’s poems are subtle and indirect articulations - a palimpsest of

memories and new spaces. Her forte lies in her acute sensitivity to the veiled

mystery of human nature and the magic of words. She writes of the layering

effects of memories with traces of earlier inscriptions / memories as the text of

life, giving it its particular density and character. Memory becomes her

invaluable aid in perceiving the meaning of her own personal experiences.

Constantly conscious of the power of memory on her creative outpouring, the

varied experience of pain, joy and loss surface as new space-time in her poems.

The postcolonial rewriting of history, both personal and social, is evident in her

poems as subtle and discerning interventions that transform her life

perspectives. Her poems gravitate towards the sombre shades of life; yet, they

radiate tender beams of humanism and Christian faith that can alleviate the

darkness of desolation. The inner landscape of the mind becomes her sight of

memory. But in some poems like “The Little Madammas” and “In Tiruvella”

she explicitly contextualises memory, drenched in Kerala flavour. The “Tight-

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Rope Walkers” and “Mother’s Stories” recreate the richness of a past, that open

the magic casement of “a lost generation” to the contemporary “wasteland.”

Stories are also memories of the real and the imagined, the warp and the weft

of the fabric of life.

The rewriting of space and time by the transforming power of memory

also implies the writing of identity. The notion of identity has been

problematised in an unprecedented manner in the multicultural modern society.

The increasing interest in the personal voice and the lyric speaker, along with

the feminist assertion of women’s experiences in women literature have greatly

revolutionized the concept of identity. The woman writer has to reposition

herself through a restructuring of language that has hitherto been the whole

monopoly of the male. She has to redefine the language structure, empowering

it with the intense awareness of her physicality. Her words stem from the day-

to-day common chores and multiple roles as wife, mother, and member of

society. Space, a contested element in every creative act, becomes a crucial

matter for women writing. Not merely a geographical entity, space becomes a

whole system of ideas, and the freedom to express them. It also involves the

making of home / homeland as an affirmation of a history that is both personal

and collective. Woman writes herself, her identity in the space of her words

that form the text to be read by the world.

Set against the Mar Thoma space of Tiruvalla and Kozhencheri, and the

multi-cultural metropolitan New York, Meena Alexander attempts to discover

her self-hood in her present postcolonial situation. Anna Sujatha Mathai does

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not project the image of a postcolonial writer hurled into the swirling issues of

ethnicity and language. Firmly rooted in India, she probes into the deep,

inexplicable regions of human mind and the changes of tone and colour of

daily life. She has also to contend with the regional writing and the growing

indifference to poetry, especially in Indian English writing. Both the poets

encounter the dialectics of language and femaleness in their quest for identity

through their creative writing. To Mathai, space is the interiority of personal

experience, the attic of creativity. The border lines shift constantly and walking

on their edge can be both thrilling and hazardous to the border crosser.

To poets like Alexander and Mathai, language is also the question of

using a colonial language. Set against their mother tongue, Malayalam, they

have to carve out their thoughts and feelings in English that is still considered

to be the language of the privileged. In her essay, “Exiled by a Dead Script,”

Alexander with great verve and passion, analyses the predicament of making

poems in English in India, for “ … to make poems in India with English, is to

be condemned to the use of a language that in its very being cringes from

actuality” (1). Keenly aware of this limitation of English, Alexander suggests

the rupturing of its syntax to subvert “the invisible ideology of Indian English”

(3). Her writing spans many a space and time: India, Sudan, Britain, and

America. Her poetry unfolds the tension of inhabiting these multiple worlds

through a passage of time. She tries to resolve the conflict between her

illiteracy in her mother tongue and her command of the colonial language by

maintaining an immediacy of sound and sense in the languages of her

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childhood. She mentions in her memoir that “a curious species of linguistic

decolonization took place … in which {her} unspoken sense of femaleness

played a great part” (Fault Lines 119). Tracing this preoccupation with

language and identity through her poems, one can easily detect a consistent

thematic development hitched to her use of poetic devices.

The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976), I Root My Name (1977), With Out Place

(1978), and Stone Roots (1980) follow a pattern that is woven into her quest for

a personal space carved out by words. She experiments ceaselessly with

English, her language of poetic imagination, acutely aware of the subterranean

flow of other languages she had come across in her childhood and college

years. The House of a Thousand Doors (1988) is a collection of powerful

poems and prose pieces that underline the figure of the ‘grandmother’ as an

anchor to the migrant sensibility of dislocation and loss of identity. Alexander

marvels at the uniqueness of her female ancestors and discovers her fractured

self in them, stating that “in my quest for an imaginative source sufficient to

withstand the pressures of life in a new world, I made up a grandmother figure”

(“Tangled Roots” The Shock of Arrival 35). In an interview, Alexander

identifies the kernel of her poetry as the ‘making of a house’ / habitation (Tharu

11). Her long poem, Night-Scene, The Garden (1992) and The Storm: A Poem

in Five Parts (1989) are lyrical renderings of the loneliness and stillness of life

moments centered on the making and unmaking of home. The introductory

poem “Provenance” sets the tone for the new book of poems, Illiterate Heart

(2000) dedicated to her father. Relationship and memory jostle each other to

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resolve into the tranquillity of self-knowledge. Her preoccupation with

language, and the infinite possibilities of writing her identity develop into a

‘poetics of return.’

Anna Sujatha Mathai’s poems, in general, oscillate towards the interiors

of the mind. More than valorizing the postcolonial angst of a hyphenated self

with multiple anchorages, the poet undertakes a tortuous journey into the dark

interiors of the self in order to substantiate the inextricable link between the

inner and the outer space. The collection of poems in Crucifixions marks an

introspective journey into the dislocation suffered by the ‘lyric self’ in a

personal space where love is hard to find. The poet strives to achieve

wholeness and harmony with the world outside and within her. She speculates

on the varieties of human freedom and the bonds across space and time to

explore personal relationships. She tries to create an identity, despite the

growing desolation. The poem “Creativity” is a sensitive study of the umbilical

cord of creativity that nourishes the poetic persona, sans motherhood. A

woman’s identity is closely linked with her body and her motherhood. “Not for

me the wonder filled / recognition of mother by child / any woman could pity

me / and I flinched from pity’s wounding stare” (8-11). Her identity is based on

how she is viewed by society and how she views herself. Her body makes her

‘visible’ to the world, and indents her personality. Her ‘barrenness’ is

transmuted into the fecundity of poetic imagination, the power to recognize

‘other miracles’ in “Life”: “But I have known other miracles / and have drunk

deep from joy’s cup” (12-13). To the poet, identity is her sense of self,

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characterized by an emphasis on the inner voice and the ability to find a way of

being that is authenticated by that self. Identity is also associated with family,

community, language and religion. The private space of her home and family is

expunged by the patriarchal norms of society. To Mathai, space is the

interiority of personal experience, the ‘attic’ of creativity. She learns to use

words and silence, and adopts the defensive strategy of speaking from more

than one point of view. Her ‘I’ is never definite nor singular and it eludes both

the writer and the reader. Her poems, in general, can be taken as a long

narrative of the ‘I,’--the female, the daughter, the wife and the adult--each

relating in its distinctive way to the patriarchal society, at the same time

forming and re-forming an identity that eludes definition.

Yet, this penchant to withdraw into the stillness of interiority is almost

totally absent in her other poems--“ In Tiruvella,” “Mother’s Stories,” “Tight

Rope Walkers”--that focus on familial ties. Culture forms beliefs and shapes

identity of a community. It focuses on kinship and relationship and very often,

the welfare of the family, the community and the tribe is more important than

the welfare of the individual. The individual exists first as kin and last as self.

In the poem “Families,” Mathai examines the dialectic relationship of the

individual with the collective. The elemental strength of familial bonds

overcomes the individual. Kinship becomes a dead albatross to be thrown aside

for freedom. But old age, infirmity, and loneliness create an urge to enter the

web of relationship.

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Mathai and Alexander carve out new spaces of meaning in their writing,

working with relationships in the wider sense of the term, relationships

between a word, sentence, idea, between one’s voice and other women’s voices

and finally, between oneself and the ‘other.’ To Alexander, the question of

home is bound with “a migrant memory and the way that poetry … permits a

dwelling at the edge of the world” (“Poem out of Place…”1). It has also to do

with the kind of shelter that poets can make with words. Anna Sujatha Mathai

writes about the poem “mysteriously taking shape within, whereby one

becomes the home” (Letter to the author). Both the poets affirm in their

distinctive manner, the possibility of a return to the ‘self’ and ‘ home,’ routed

in the unpredictable detours of words and in the labour of poetic composition.

Alexander names the creative space as the “zone of radical illiteracy, the

curious place beneath the hold of a given syntax, … a zone to which words do

not attach, a realm where syntax flees” (“Poem out of Place…” 6). It is a zone

that will recognize neither the moorings of place, nor the sensuous densities of

location.

Alexander has evolved a ‘poetics of return’ out of her vast repertoire of

experience as an immigrant poet and an academic. Her ‘aesthetics’ springs

from her intuitive grasp of the unpredictable and incalculable layers of

creativity. In her powerful essays-“Poem out of Place-Zone of Radical

Illiteracy,” “Lyric in Time of Violence,” “The Poem’s Second Life: Writing

and Self- Identity,” and the “Poetics of Dislocation,” Alexander probes into the

whole gamut of creative writing with remarkable sensitivity and perspicacity.

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Her migrant sensitivity lends a sharpness and fragility to her poetic vision of

homeland. Alexander introduces a new concept called “the zone of radical

illiteracy” to explain the complex process of creativity. The zone is ‘radical,’

for it triggers unpredictable changes, its fiery muteness endowing it with a state

of wordlessness that spells ‘illiteracy.’ It is the space of emptiness out of which

new forms and meanings evolve. It is the storehouse of unformed thoughts and

emotions out of which are translated a new consciousness and space. She posits

the possibility of making shelter with words and a dwelling in a poem.

Alexander never fails to be intrigued and entranced by the tenuous gaps

between thought and word, in the silence that fills with meaning. Her childhood

fascination for the musty fragrance of her Tiruvalla garden, the sensuous hold

of its red soil takes shape into a literary and a poetic concept.

To Mathai, the poem validated her existence as a human being, helping

her to reinvent a new world for herself. Writing enabled her to ease out her

intense loneliness and disjunctions caused by her marital break down. “We

moved from house to house and I had no place … . So it [poem] was the only

thing that was accessible to me” (Kuortti 199). The intense pressure of

suppressed pain makes a poet like Mathai reach out for some light and to

“give a little space to a vision of justice, beauty, truth …” (Kuortti 209). The

internal landscapes, and the overwhelming power of hidden knowledge can be

made visible, and voiced in a subversive way in the little space of a lyric. To

Alexander, the lyric is a form, intensely alive, yet fragile. It is a place of

extreme silence permitting a crystallization of the realities, to offer a

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therapeutic release from the stultifying force of raw emotions to both poet and

the reader. Both the poets delve into the intricate and sometimes evasive

patterns of speech in order to “sort out a form that makes sense to others”

(“Almost Literally Making Ground: A Conversion with Meena Alexander” 14).

The resonance of an inner life breaks through the gaps of silence in their

poems. Bursting with vividness, Alexander’s poems become a taut string on

which she attempts to play the ‘migrant music.’ Mathai’s poetry is a

mellifluous flow of highly personalized moments, indented with graceful ease

and felicity. Life moments are scrutinized and neatly sketched with the keen

observation and detached concentration of an artist.

Alexander’s choice of the garden as her ‘primary space’ to interrogate

the vicissitudes of human life and its fine threads of relationship is deeply

entrenched in a ‘poetics of return.’ She identifies her creative zone in the

inextricable bonding with her Tiruvalla soil and home--“As a small child, how

did I attach myself to place? I shut my eyes and see a child in a tree” (“Poetics

of Dislocation” 3). She alludes to that tree of childhood in her poem “Black

River, Walled Garden”:

I swayed in a cradle hung in a tree

and all of the visible world-

walled garden

black river- flowed in me. (20-23)

Anna Sujatha Mathai’s poems flow unfettered by theoretical reasoning

and philosophical ruminations. She renders her total ‘self’ and vision of life in

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her poems that amaze the reader by their stark simplicity and lyrical beauty.

Acutely aware of the agony and ecstasy of creative writing, she cajoles her

words to gather grace and wholeness ‘inch by inch’ in her poem “Goddess

without Arms” (Life-On My Side of the Street and Other Poems: Dialogue and

Other Poems). It is a poem on the making of a poem, hinged on the binary

opposites of the ideal and the real. The opening line “My poetry didn’t come

full-blown,” implies the necessity of ruptures in the making of a work of beauty

and grace. The slow process of gaining a form is fraught with moments of

doubt and anxiety. The poem needs time to evolve into a full-fledged piece of

art, which is both graceful and complete. The poet cannot aspire for the perfect

beauty of a goddess, as she is painfully aware of the inadequacy of language to

‘word’ the world. The dire necessity to re-invent a new world for herself must

have made the poet in her dwell on the making of a poem. The regal splendor

of Venus and the divine grace of Saraswati are visually and specifically

identified in the lines:

It was never a goddess

Rising from the waters

………………………

A Canova Venus or Saraswati,

Resplendent in her plenitude,

Certain of her sovereignty. (4-5, 9-11)

Her life- experience has taught her otherwise:

No. It grew painfully,

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Armless

Limbless

Somewhat blind. (13-16)

The present thesis incorporates a fresh approach to the re-figuring of

‘place’ as ‘space’ in the poems of Mathai and Alexander, from the vantage

point of Kerala, their homeland. At the outset, what seemed a simplistic search

of “Kerala” as place, developed into a complex process of re-defining the

geographical fact as new spaces in their creative writing. The growing

realization of the generational gap between Mathai (1939-) and Alexander

(1951-), necessitated a re-thinking on postcolonial subjectivity, enhanced by

the incisive arguments and relevant musings on the issues of dislocation,

hyphenated identity and the subversive power in the usage of the English

language in Alexander’s powerful book, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on

Postcolonial Experience. It is a deft interweaving of prose and poem, with each

segment intersecting the themes of language, writing and diaspora in the light

of the contemporary world of violence, racism, neocolonial interventions and

the female experience of the ‘body.’ In the “altered light” of migrant

experience, her poems bristle with a new sensibility and vibrate with the

ambivalent forces of subjective and experimental creativity. Her memoir Fault

Lines provides a subjective base for the postcolonial reflections on identity,

memory and space.

The focus is primarily on Alexander’s ten collections of poems and

prose-pieces ranging from The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976) to The Illiterate Heart

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(2002). The text flowers into new dimensions of meaning out of a close reading

of her memoir Fault Lines that not only unravels her past, but also highlights

themes that occur in her poetry. A thematic study of her poems, replenished

with her pungent prose- pieces, develops into a deeper understanding of spatial

configurations evolving in her poetry. Mathai’s poetry draws the reader gently

into the mindscape of the lyric speaker to unfold the nuance of relationship

with the world. Space is personalized, and borders are crossed effortlessly,

weaving an intricate pattern of timelessness and spacelessness. The angst of

dislocation framed by the migrant sensibility in Alexander’s poetry set against

the Asian-American aesthetics, enters the deep waters of interiority in Mathai’s

poetry, silhouetted by Indian writing in English.

The poems have been analysed with the focus on the distinctive

ambience of the two poets, avoiding as much as possible a comparative study.

The thesis develops as an enquiry into the use of memory as a strategy,

underscoring the migrant sensibility in Alexander, and the subtle interiorising

of dislocation in Mathai. The female perspective in their writing propels the

study to enter the dynamics of identities and diversities. The making of identity

is a process that is shaped and re-shaped by the use of language, to culminate in

the return to a space of selfhood in the poem itself. Creativity and identity

coexist in this ‘poetics of return,’ highlighting the multiple layers of meaning

embedded in the ‘word.’

There is a dearth of serious study on the writing of the two poets, though

their poems have been reviewed individually in Asian American Writing,

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World Literature Today, Kavya Bharathi and Poetry Chronicle by critics and

poets like Krishna Rayan, K. Ayyappa Paniker, Manju Jaidka, Oliver Perry,

Gopal Gandhi, and have been analyzed in scholarly articles by academic critics

like Anupam Jain, Aparajitha Nanda and Vijayasree. C. The present thesis

attempts to introduce the spatial dimension to the poetry of Mathai and

Alexander.