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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal ISSN 2278-9529

Meena Alexander’s Raw Silk: Agonies of a Wounded Soul

Aditi Jana
Assistant Teacher,English: Bathanberia Srinibash Vidyamandir[H.S.],
Kolaghat, W.B.

Meena Alexander is an excellent diasporic writer. She is a writer of international acclaim

who, with her global identity depicts the heart-wrenching tragedies that took place in
New York and Gujrat, in her volume “Raw Silk” [1]. The violence, cruelty, brutality in
home (India) and in abroad (New York) make our blood run cold in the spine. The
horrible impact of ethnic clashes, racism and dogmatism is portrayed here. We
experience the terror and torture of hell as we go through the poems of “Raw Silk”. She
unveils the naked reality of the present world in “Fragile Places” [2] where she mentions
the saying of Sankaracharya, the great philosopher of Advaita Vedanta:
The world is a forest on fire.
The peace, bliss and happiness of the world are always sacrificed on the altar of brutality,
violence, animality and animosity. Humanity has lost its value. The horror of ethnic-
struggle in Ahmedabad and the attack on New York’s World Trade Centre makes us
numb. Harvard Review comments on “Raw Silk”:
Alexander’s… collection… shares some of the qualities of silk: strong,
vivid, resilient, marked with stubs, like the violence that is part of the
texture of our cruel and anxious age… The poems… are vivid monuments
to what we have lost and remembers of the enormity of what we have left
to lose.
The ubiquity of terror, the recurrence of “blood” image in “Raw Silk” reminds us of
W. B. Yeats’s memorable lines in “The Second Coming”:
Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad. She had her English education in Khartoum.
Her roots are in Kerala and Sudan where she spent her childhood. Later she went to
Nottingham University to have the Ph.D degree. At present she is teaching in Hunter
College, New York. She is a poet, a novelist, a prose writer with transcultural and
transcontinental ethos. Her poetry is truly cerebral. The readers get intrigued to unravel
the webs of complexity in her poems. The ethnic uprising, violence, class-clash are
reflected in volumes of poetry like “The Bird’s Bright Ring” and “Raw Silk”. “Raw Silk”
reveals the quintessential truth that though we are civilized, we have not overcome our
basic instincts for cruelty and animality. The issues of exile, identity crisis, search for
roots, migration are discussed from a much broader perspective. Human beings have been
degenerated into its lowest stage. Meena Alexander says in “Fragile Places: A Poet’s
Notebook” that once she went to Santiniketan, the realm of peace, the dwelling place of
Tagore. There she roamed reminiscing of the dead poet. Suddenly she came across some
lines from “Sesh Lekha” [3] of Tagore. She immediately identifies herself with the poet’s
feelings which are universal, and saddening:

Vol. II. Issue. I 1 January 2013

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal ISSN 2278-9529

On the banks of the Rupnarayana

I woke
and realized this world
was no dream.
With alphabets of blood
I saw myself defined
I recognized myself
Through endless suffering
Countless wounds.
Truth is cruel:
I live its cruelty
For it never lies. [“Sesh Lekha”]
This is the reality of the world. We never learn from history. We close the chapters on
violence and mass- killing in our history book to introduce ourselves into new and
horrifying chapters of tragedy. It is said that those who do not learn from history are
condemned to repeat it. The events of Godhara, Naroda Patiya, the conflagration of
World Trade Centre and Pentagon in New York are witnesses to our sorrows and
sufferings. Pangs of panic follow Meena Alexander. She was present in New York in
September 11, 2001. Again, she visited the relief camps of Ahamedabad where the
survivors of Hindu- Muslim ethnic clashes took shelter. The depiction of reality is so
vivid, so touching that it brings tears to our eyes. It is as if we ourselves become the
victims and witnesses of these savage carnages. We share the same feeling of anger,
annoyance, hatred and shame towards the tales of the fall of humanity with Meena
Alexander.
“Dialogue by a City Wall” reveals suppressed sorrow in the lovers’ heart. Love cannot
bloom in the war afflicted countries. Love loses its spontaneity. Lovers become strangers
here. The imagery of ‘blood’ comes in red ink. The girl tries to console the lover as well
as herself by saying:
The instruments of war
Are buried underwater. [“Dialogues by a City Wall’]
The strain of Panic lurking underneath is well expressed in the last lines in the assertion
of assertion of transcultural as well as expatriate feminist voice:
I am Sita and Iphigenia, Demeter and Draupadi
I am not fit for burning. [“Dialogues by a City Wall”]
The poem “Aftermath” in “Late There was an Island” is outstanding in its bare beauty
and stark reality:
There is an uncommon light in the sky.
Pale petals are scored into stone. [“Aftermath”]
“Petals” are generally associated with beauty, softness and fragrance. But here they are
turned into inanimate stone. The whole atmosphere is terror-stricken. “Blood” is on the
green leaves. So, the poet says:
But its leaves are filled with insects
With wings of colour of dry blood.
The images of “cut hand”, “eye”, “a leaf” stifle our feelings. Sky loses its colour and it is
filled with smoke of terrorism which takes a gigantic proportion in its ubiquity of
operation. The ashes of the towers of World Trade Centre blackens the shining day. The

Vol. II. Issue. I 2 January 2013

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal ISSN 2278-9529

poems of “Late, There was an Island” are interrelated in their portrayal of death,
anarchism, destruction. Not only the human beings are the victims, the vegetation are not
free from the cruel clutches of all-nullifying force. In “Invisible City”, the trees are
bruised. The poet deplores the fact:
Tall towers, twin towers, I used to see
A bloody seam of sense drops free.
“Pitfire” captures the note of a satanic voice sounded in the news:
We’ve even struck the bird’s throat. [“Pitfire”]
Savagery has done its worst:
Do you see
the sash of blood
where the shops were [“Hard Rowing”]
“Kabir sings in a city of Burning Towers” and “Ghalib’s ghost are packed with images of
destruction and brutality, terror and torture”.

Alexander wrote “School Yard” for her son Adam Kuruvilla. Terrorism has affected the
abode of innocence and learning. The image of the school yard near Battery Park is
expressed thus:
Now the walls are on fire
The deserted school yard has turned into a place for nursing the victims of burning:
men and women half-alive
skin smoldering.
The issues of partition between India and Pakistan are explored by the poet in “For a
Friend Whose Father was Killed on the Lahore Border in the 1965 War between India
and Pakistan”. These riot-ridden issues were handled in “The Bird’s Bright Ring” where
the contemporary fiery condition between India and Pakistan were called “Fragile as the
filament of an egg” [4]. The voices of the butchered people like the hawker, the cobbler,
the beggar bring the horror of nightmare experiences of the partition. In this poem
mentioned in “Raw Silk”, the poet comes to her friend of a bundle of bones. The bundle
covers the “pity of war” that means the bones of her friend’s father. The poet’s lacerated
mind asks:
Where are the burnt fields of the Punjab?
The killing fields of Partition?
The poem “Firefly” raises the poet’s quintessential question as a diasporic writer:
I have crawled in and out of the sky.
Who am I?
The devastation and destruction if New York and Naroda Patiya and Godhara put the
poet’s self into a cocoon where she can’t identify herself properly. The first image
shudders us with “smoke in the trees”. The ethnic clashes and struggles between the
Hindus and the Muslims snatched away the smile of India. The lines in “Firefly” are quite
symbolic here:
In Naroda Patiya, in Godhara
Children sing in the ground.
The poem is full of bleak images of crying and dying. In Godhara many Hindu pilgrims
were burnt alive and in Naroda Patiya many Muslims were brutally killed in retaliation.
Many women and children were killed in these two massacres. So these two places are

Vol. II. Issue. I 3 January 2013

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal ISSN 2278-9529

full of the dying shrieks of men, women and children. The ashes of the children are
scattered on the ground.
The title poem “Raw Silk” is infused with memory, exile, identity and above all irony.
Alexander becomes nostalgic about her past, her amma and her grandmother’s silk sari:
Raw silk
Brought all the way from Varanasi.
Danger lurks in the past when she recalls the picture of the blazing town. The soft, sweet
and fragrant days of childhood are set in sharp contrast in the images of mass killing
weapons:
guns, grenades, blisters of smoke
on market place and mosque.
The historical events of Salt March and the bonfire arranged by Gandhi are called upon
here. The past days of colonization and partition are always hued in the colour of blood:
the country yard was a sea of blood
When grandmother died.
The poet kept the wedding sari of her grandmother under her protection. It was wrapped
in muslin and set in a wardrobe. The incidents of a mother being killed on the street or a
girl being pinned to bed or the bricks of a wall set on fire are unforgettable experiences
for the poet. She can’t escape the traumatic memories of those unbearable torturous
events. The raw silk turns into heaps of ashes. Nothing can escape the riot of the
dogmatized and frenzied fanatics. There is no scope for beauty, bounty, peace, assertion,
assurance, confidence and conviction in this world where jealousy, skepticism is
dominant. Man was once the builder of civilization. He now turns everything into ashes.
The communal riots in India and massacre in New York are nothing but the mere
repititions in the history of devastation and destruction. So, the concluding lines of “Raw
Silk” are:
I touch smoke
Raw silk turned to smoke in the night’s throat.

“Door” is surrealistic and symbolic in its undertone. The poet floats back to her homeland
in her memory. She remembers the olive tree, a symbol of peace, planted beside her
house. But a “hole in the trunk” hints at the danger lying beneath the apparent surface of
peaceful atmosphere. The hole becomes the dwelling place of the “swarm of bees”. The
bees have stings which pain us. The blending of beauty and terror is juxtaposed. It also
reminds her of her sexual abuse [5] of her grandfather.

The poet acknowledges the contribution of Svati Joshi and Ramu Gandhi in creating
“Letters to Gandhi”. She was in Ahmedabad on 19th September, 2002. She came across
the victims of ethnic violence in the relief camps. She turns to Mahatma Gandhi, the
father of the Nation, the preacher of Non-violent action and worshipper of Ahimsa:
Oh, so many questions, Sir
I cannot help myself
I cannot shut my mouth [“Slow Dancing”]
The disparity in between Gandhi’s dream of the independent nation and the reality of
contemporary India becomes so glaring in the burning of a train carrying the Hindu
activists by the Muslims or the aftermath of Godhara orchestrated by the Hindu

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal ISSN 2278-9529

extremists. The plundering of Muslim properties, mutilation of men, mass rape of women
showed signs of a deteriorating nation. “Lyric with Doves”, “Slow Dancing” and
“Bengali Market” are vociferous with so many questions about the burning nation.
“Searching for a Tomb over Which They Paved a Road” depicts the sad tale of the poet
Wali Gujrati whose tomb is not given any kind of reverence. The struggle among
different communities does not spare even the dead singers and poets. Alexander asks:
Where is the tomb
of Wali Gujrati?

In “Fragile Places: A Poet’s Notebook”, the poet remembers the lines of Wallace Stevens
in “Mozart 1935”, where the poet advises a poet in his poem to sit at his piano in the
crisis period of the nation:
Be thou the voice
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear
The voice of this besieging pain.
Alexander serves this purpose in “Raw Silk”. Her poetry becomes the perfect medium for
expressing anger, bitterness, hatred against the war, riot, communal animosity. The world
becomes a fragile place. It is losing its stability. The events of New York and India are
the microcosm of the universal world struggle for power. In “Blue Lotus”, Alexander
embraces humanitarian philosophy as it was preached by poets and prophets belonging to
various nations and continents:
William, Rabindranath, Czeslaw
Mirabai, Anna, Adrienne
reach out your hands to me.[“Blue Lotus”]
The contemporary sorrows and sufferings blur the boundaries of nations and countries.
They become one and the same. The poet laments in “Rumours for an Immigrant”:
There is no homeland anymore
All nations are abolished…
“Raw Silk” becomes a brilliant example of trans-continental feelings. Meena Alexander
transcends the personal concerns and worries to embrace the universal perspective. The
beauty and brutality, the calm and ferocity of the images are really soul-stirring.

Works Cited:

[1] Meena Alexander 2004. Raw Silk, TriQuarterly Books Northwestern University
Press.
[2] Meena Alexander 2005. Fragile Places: A Poet’s Notebook, volume no. 122,
Academic Journal article from TriQuarterly.
[3] Pritish Nandy 2002. Shesh Lekha, The Last Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, transl.
(New Delhi, Rupa, 2002) p.27.
[4] C. L. Khatri 2008. Muse As Rebel in Meena Alexander’s The Bird’s Bright Ring. In:
Gauri Shankar Jha, Indian English Poetry: Recent Explanations, Authors Press, pp.51-60.
[5] Meena Alexander 1993(new expanded edition 2003). Fault Lines, Feminist Press at
CUNY.

Vol. II. Issue. I 5 January 2013