BLUE LOTUS/ MEENA ALEXANDER

'It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves'

Wallace Stevens
I

Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields

clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.
What was distinct turns to mist,

what was fitful burns the heart.

When I dream of my tribe gathering
by the red soil of the Pamba River

I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.

Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?
You kiss the stump and where the wrist

Bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.

There is a blue lotus in my grandmother's garden,
its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.

II

An altar, a stone cracked down the spine,

a shelter, a hovel of straw and sperm
out of which rise a man and a woman

and one is a ghost though I cannot tell which

for the sharpness between them scents
even the orchids, a sharing of things

invisible till the mountain fetches

itself out of water out of ice out of sand
and they each take tiny morsels

of the mountain and set it on banana leaves

and as if it were a feast of saints
they cry out to their dead and are satisfied.
III

I have climbed the mountain and cleared

away the sand and ice using first my bare hands
then a small knife. Underneath I found

the sign of the four-cornered world, gammadion,

which stands for migration, for the scattering
of the people. The desolation of the mothers

singing in their rock houses becomes us,

so too the child at the cliff's edge
catching a cloud in her palm

as stocks of blood are gathered on the plain,

spread into sheaves, a circlet for bones
and flint burns and the mountain resurrects itself.

IV

Tribe, tribute, tribulation:

to purify the tongue and its broken skin
I am learning the language again,

a new speech for a new tribe.

How did I reach this nervous empire,
sharp store of sense?

Donner un sens plus pur etc. etc.

does not work so well anymore,
nor calme bloc ici-bas.

Blunt metals blossom.

Children barter small arms.
Ground rules are abolished.

The earth has no capitals.

In my distinct notebooks
I write things of this sort.

Monsoon clouds from the shore

near my grandmother's house
 float through my lines.

I take comfort in sentences.

"Who cares what you write?"
someone cries.

A hoarse voice, I cannot see the face.

He smells like a household ghost.
There can be no concord between us.

I search out a bald rock between two trees,

ash trees on the riverbank
on an island where towers blazed.

This is my short
incantation,
my long way home.

William, Rabindranath, Czeslaw,

Mirabai, Anna, Adrienne
reach out your hands to me.

Now stones have tongues.

Sibilant scattering,
stormy grace!

The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither

Muslim Nor Hindu in India
"To be no part of this hate is deprivation.
Never could I claim a circumcised butcher
Mangled a child out of my arms, never rave
At the milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite
Who pulled off my mother's voluminous
Robes and sliced away at her dugs.
Planets focus their fires
Into a worm of destruction
Edging along the continent. Bodies
Turn ashen and shrivel. I
Only burn my tail"
-Gieve Patel
On Killing a Tree
It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out of it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leperous hide
Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop

But this alone wont do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.

No,
The root is to be pulled out -
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out - snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.

Then the matter

Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.
Gieve Patel (born in 18 August 1940)[1] is an Indian poet, playwright, painter,[2] as well as a
practicing physician/doctor based in Mumbai. Patel belongs to a group of writers who have
subscribed themselves to the 'Green Movement' which is involved in an effort to protect the
environment. His poems speak of deep concerns for nature and expose man's cruelty to it. Patel's
works include poems, How Do You Withstand(1966), Body (1976) and Mirrored Mirroring (1991).
He has also written three plays titled princes, Savaska, and Mr Behram.

Toward the end of his life, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty became preoccupied
with what he called “the flesh of the world.” I cannot think of a better phrase to describe the
central theme of Gieve Patel’s poetry, available to us now in a single, slim half-century-spanning
volume, as arresting as it is compact. The flesh of the world. Something more than conventional
carnality: the ambivalent intimation of a common substance across the human and the non -
human, the living and the inanimate. A substance that both exceeds the human and yet becomes
available to us only through the most unblinking human attention. Such is the sensibility that
gives us these astonishing poems.

An easy mistake to make when reading Patel is to look for the consolations of human proportion.
To be sure, there is plenty of sly humour here. But the human appears in Patel’s poems most
often as a problem of disproportion. To be incarnated means to be at once interchangeable and
isolated: “Flesh endlessly replicated/And divided as often” (‘Say Torture’). Especially in the later
poems, however, it seems that our porosity may also be the condition of our freedom: “It makes
sense not/to have the body/seamless,/hermetically sealed, a/non-orificial/box of
incorruptibles./Better shot through and through!/Interpenetrated/ – with the world” (‘It
Makes’).

The earliest pieces are from Poems (1966), saturated by what Patel has described as the then-
recent “shock” of his medical training. Here, a young man’s cultivated seriousness confronts
bodies casually sliced open and turned inside out, patients’ collapsing hopes and the insistent
adjacency of healing and violence. Patel is already attuned to the enigmatic resonance between
human and non-human matter: “The sun touches the mango bark./In the dissection hall the
head/Is shaved, the outline clear” (‘The Difference in the Morgue’).

Nature appears bracingly indifferent: “trees that cannot care/Whether I live or die” (‘Seasons’).
Nor should we, Patel cautions, too quickly comfort ourselves with pious expectations of post -
mortem merger: “The myths we bestow upon death:/The passing away of a divided/Conflicted
being, the appearance/Of a unity, and total possession” (‘Post-Mortem Report’). Indeed, it is
perhaps precisely once we surrender these morbid myths that a more vital interpenetration
becomes possible: “Stone wall, warm wood,/The flesh on my arm,/The stratum’s
fervour,/Meaning, matter,/Distilled, absorbed/Into mind and heart” (‘Spider’).
In Patel’s second collection, How Do You Withstand, Body (1976), the flesh of the world often
appears as the tortured substance of citizenship in anxious times. The viscera earlier
encountered on the dissection table turn out to be just as much those of the nation and its
multitudes. Belonging seems now, in a horrifying parody of a social contract, to depend on being
a recognisable target of collective anger. In a famously ironic line, Patel laments: “To be no part
of this hate is deprivation” (‘The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim Nor
Hindu in India’). Inflicted pain is incommunicable, sequestering us from our neighbours:
“Could/Violence performed on me/Register anywhere at all/Outside?” (‘Bodyfears, Here I
Stand’). And yet somehow it has become the only readily intelligible global language of the
masses: “The shared full-throated applause/Of a crowd made aware for once/Of every
sensation/Under its dress” (‘Audience’). As things fall apart, agony is “A song of ragged
pitch,/The century’s folk song” (‘Continuum’).

It has often been noted that Patel’s third book of poems, Mirrored, Mirroring (1991), marks a
spiritual turn in his work. But if “God or/something like that” (‘God or’) becomes mentionable
during these years, then this, too, is another variation on his lifelong meditation on the flesh of
the world. Crucially, Patel continues to refuse any consoling rush toward sublimation, least of all
any transcendence of the sexual, secreting body (‘The Return,’ ‘Speeding’).

Matter in its very banality is the most appropriate seat of the divine: “Any atom on earth should
do/To sit by” (‘The Place’). If anything, the palpable presence of “God or/something like that”
turns humans into the media of an eternally enigmatic purpose: “Then how did we get caught
up/In God’s Effort/To Understand Himself?” (‘Mirrored, Mirroring’). There is perhaps a new
ethical sensibility in these later poems, and an occasional readiness to imagine more serene
dissolutions: “Dying/Could be this luxury, melting away/Into a quintessential afternoon”
(‘Decadent Poem’). But irony and satire remain inextricable from even the holiest visions (as
they do in the wonderful translations of the 16th century Gujarati mystic Akho that accompany
Patel’s own pieces here). Visitations are as likely to be brutal as they are to be tranquil.

In a novel by the Swedish writer Johannes Anyuru, a character invokes two clichés as the
conditions of an uncanny provocation. If our mortality is what makes us human, he asks, and art
is what makes us immortal, then does art make us inhuman? Reading Gieve Patel’s
extraordinary Collected Poems inspires me to re-approach this riddle in an emphatically
affirmative spirit. It is not that art fails us by betraying our humanity in some sterile grab at
eternity. It is rather that, as Patel shows us, art can liberate us from the sterile garb of the human
by insisting that the flesh of the world is a substance in which we are always – anxiously,
ecstatically – in motion, at once less and more than our human selves.

I find myself returning over and over to Patel’s invocation of the nymph Daphne who, according
to Greek legend, escaped the unwanted attentions of Apollo by becoming a tree.
Characteristically, tellingly, Patel finds an opening not in the respite of her transformation, but in
the blurred movement when she was neither one thing nor another: “Passing/From woman to
foliage did she for a moment/Sense all vegetable sap as current/Of her own bloodstream, the
green/Flooding into the red? And when/She achieved her final arboreal being,/Shed dewy tears
each dawn/For that lost fleeting moment,/That hint at freedom,/In transit, between cage and
cage?” (‘Squirrels in Washington’).

Meena Alexander (17 February 1951 – 21 November 2018)[1] was an Indian poet, scholar,
and writer.[2] Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked
in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at
the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English.[3][4]

Meena Alexander, described as "undoubtedly one of the finest poets of contemporary times" by The
Statesman was born into a Syrian Christian family from Kerala, South India.[5][6][7] She lived
in Allahabad and Kerala until she was almost five when her father's work—as a scientist for the
Indian government—took the family to Khartoum in newly independent Sudan.[4] She attended
the Unity High School there and after graduating in 1964,[8] when she was only thirteen, Alexander
enrolled in Khartoum University, where she studied English and French literature. There she wrote
her first poems, which were translated into Arabic and published in a local newspaper. After
graduating with a Bachelor's degree Honors from Khartoum University in 1969, she moved
to England and began doctoral study at the University of Nottingham. She earned a PhD in English
in 1973 — at the age of 22 — with a dissertation in Romantic literature that she would later
develop and publish as The Poetic Self.[4] She then moved to India and taught at several universities,
including the University of Delhi and the University of Hyderabad.[9] During the five years she lived
in India she published her first three books of poetry: The Bird's Bright Ring (1976), I Root My
Name (1977), and Without Place (1978). In 1979 she was a visiting fellow at the University of Paris-
Sorbonne. The following year she moved to New York City and became an assistant
professor at Fordham University, where she remained until 1987 when she became an assistant
professor in the English Department at Hunter College, the City University of New
York (CUNY).[4] Two years later she joined the graduate faculty of the PhD program in English at the
CUNY Graduate Center. In 1992 she was made full professor of English and Women's Studies. She
was appointed Distinguished Professor of English in 1999 and continued to teach in the PhD
program at the Graduate Center and the MFA program at Hunter College. Over the years she also
taught poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.[9] Since
moving to New York, Alexander was a prolific author, publishing six more volumes of poetry, two
books of literary criticism, two books of lyric essays, two novels, and a memoir. She was married to
David Lelyveld, the historian and brother of journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld, and had two
children.
Alexander is known for lyric poetry that deals with migration, its impact on the subjectivity of the
writer, and the violent events that sometimes compel people to cross borders.[10] Though
confronting such stark and difficult issues, her writing is sensual, polyglot, and maintains a
generous spirit.[3] About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston said: "Meena Alexander sings of
countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one
needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her
visions and remembers and is uplifted."[3] Alexander was influenced and mentored by the Indian
poets Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das, as well as the American poets Adrienne Rich and Galway
Kinnell.
Among her best-known works are the volumes of poetry Illiterate Heart (2002) and Raw
Silk (2004).[10] Her latest volume of poetry is Atmospheric Embroidery(2015).[11] She edited a
volume of poems in the Everyman Series, Indian Love Poems (2005), and published a volume of
essays and poems on the themes of migration and memory called The Shock of Arrival: Reflections
on Postcolonial Experience (2006). In 1993 Alexander published her autobiographical memoir, Fault
Lines (significantly revised in 2003 to incorporate new material).[12] She published two
novels, Nampally Road (1991)—which was a Village Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice—
and Manhattan Music (1997), and two academic studies, The Poetic Self (1979) and Women in
Romanticism (1989). Fault Lines was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the
year in 1993. Illiterate Heart won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award.[10]
Her poems have been set to music. Impossible Grace was the lyric base of the First Al Quds Music
Award, with music composed by Stefan Heckel and sung by baritone Christian von Oldenburg
(Ffirst performed in Jerusalem).[13] `Acqua Alta' was set to music by the composer Jan
Sandstrom and performed by the Serikon Music Group and the Swedish Radio Choir (first
performed in Stockholm)
Alexander read at Poetry International (London), Struga Poetry Evenings, Poetry Africa, Calabash
Festival, Harbor Front Festival, Sahitya Akademi (India) and other international gatherings.[14] She
received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller
Foundation, Arts Council England, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of
Learned Societies, National Council for Research on Women, New York State Council on the
Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. She was in residence at
the MacDowell Colony and held the Martha Walsh Pulver residency for a poet at Yaddo. She was a
Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne (Paris IV), Frances Wayland Collegium Lecturer at Brown
University, Writer in Residence at the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University,
University Grants Commission Fellow at Kerala University, and Writer in Residence at the National
University of Singapore. In 1998 she was a Member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Prize
for Literature. She served as an Elector, American Poets' Corner, at the Cathedral of Saint John the
Divine, New York.[14] She was the recipient of the 2009 Literary Excellence Award from the South
Asian Literary Association (an organization allied to the Modern Languages Association) for
contributions to American literature.[15] In 2014, Meena Alexander was named a National Fellow at
the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. In the summer of 2016 she was a Poet in
Residence at the Ghetto Nuovo/ Beit Venezia as part of the 500th anniversary celebrations of the
Jewish Ghetto. Her cycle of poems inspired by the 17th-century poet Sarra Copia Sulam was
published in the volume Poems for Sarra/ Poesie per Sara(Poems by Meena Alexander, Rita Dove,
Esther Schor, Venezia: Damocle, 2018)
Her book Poetics of Dislocation was published in 2009 by the University of Michigan Press as part of
its Poets on Poetry Series. Also in 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing brought out an anthology of
scholarship on her work titled Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander.
The poems in her book Birthplace with Buried Stones "convey the fragmented experience of the
traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere".[16]
Of the poems in her book Atmospheric Embroidery A. E. Stallings writes: "Alexander’s language is
precise, her syntax is pellucid, and her poems address all of the senses, offering a simultaneous
richness and simplicity." Vijay Seshadri writes: "The beautiful paradox of Meena Alexander’s art has
always been found in the distillation of her epic human and spiritual experience into a pure and
exquisite lyricism. That paradox and that lyricism are on triumphant display in this book."[17]
Of her anthology Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing Simon Gikandi writes: "Name
Me A Word is an indispensable guide for readers of Indian writing, animating the powerful impulses
of the country's famous writers and introducing the multiple voices that gone into the making of the
most important literature of our time."[18]
She died in New York on 21 November 2018, at the age of 67, from undisclosed
causes,[19][1] although according to her husband she died of endometrial serous cancer.[20]