Meena Alexander Died – Poet Who Wrote Dislocation Dies at 67, Known for Award-Winning Poetry Collection Illiterate Heart – Latest Update May 2024
Meena Alexander’s death on November 21 was a devastating loss for her friends and admirers of poetry. Sadly, most of us anticipated her passing as she was quickly losing her battle with cancer. She was highly productive, writing a lot of prose and poetry. Her memoir, Fault Lines, is still unread in my possession, I regret to admit. She had a kind heart, yet she expressed powerful opinions against violence and injustice.
Renowned author Amitav Ghosh described her as an outstanding individual in all aspects, expressing his sorrow on Twitter upon learning of her passing. “As a poet and a human being. I will miss her,” Ghosh said about Alexander who was also a Distinguished Professor of English in the PhD program at the Graduate Center in Hunter College, City University of New York.
“Meena Alexander was one of a kind. Her success in poetry was hardly recognized in the United States. The way it was seen globally and maybe that is because Meena’s poetics and aesthetics are better understood in the context of Indian and Sudanese-African poetry, poet and writer Kazim Ali, told.
| Name | Mary Elizabeth Alexander |
| Born | 17 February 1951 |
| Died | 21 November 2018 (aged 67) |
| Occupation | Poet, Auther, Scholar, Essayist, Professor |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Marital Status | Married |
| Spouse | David Lelyveld |
| Children | Adam Lelyveld, Svati Lelyveld |
| Education | Doctorate in British Romantic Literature |
Who was the writer of the Award-Winning Poetry Collection “Illiterate Heart” Meena Alexander?
Meena Alexander, born in Allahabad in 1951 to Malayali parents, was brought up in South India and Sudan. Her childhood, she once wrote, was spent traveling between India and Sudan. During her early years, she was exposed to various fragmented languages – Malayalam in Tiruvella, Kerala, Hindi and Sanskrit in Allahabad, English throughout India, and French and Arabic in Khartoum.
At the age of fifteen, she decided to switch from her birth name Mary Elizabeth to Meena, the name she used for all her published work. In her book Fault Lines, Alexander mentioned that “Meena” translates to fish in Sanskrit and enamel jeweling in Urdu. It had been her home name and it was the name under which she wished “to appear”.
At eighteen, she went abroad to pursue her PhD at Nottingham University in England, then came back to India to work as a teacher at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and the Central Institute of English in Hyderabad during 1975 to 1977, the period of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi.
She met David Lelyveld, an American historian of South Asia, in 1979 in Hyderabad and they got married. Following that, she relocated to the United States and commenced her studies in the US. She has been a resident of New York City since the 1980s, where she brought up her two children Adam and Svati.
Meena Alexander Career:
The initial poetry of Alexander was released in India through the Calcutta Writers Workshop. Her debut poetry book House of Thousand Doors was published in 1988 in the United States, followed by River and Bridge in 1996. The anthology The Shock of Arrival: Reflections of Postcolonial Experience features lyrical essays and poetry, along with Illiterate Heart, Raw Silk, Quickly Changing River, Birthplace of Buried Stone, and the most recent collection Atmospheric Embroidery released in 2018.
Alexander released two novels as well – Nampally Road in 1992 and Manhattan Music in 2000. Her memoir Fault Lines, first published by the Feminist Press of the City University of New York in 1993 and later revised in 2003, is the most analyzed among her prose works.
In her poems, she often explores the theme of the challenges brought by colonial language and pedagogy when representing her life as a female poet in a postcolonial world. In the poem “Illiterate Heart,” she skillfully portrays the disconnect between her British modernist intellectual background and her personal experiences.
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