The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

Front Cover
South End Press, 1996 - 223 pages
Contents

Overture Another Voice

Piecmeal Shelters

Piecemeal Shelters
Art of Pariahs
Language and Shame
Alphabets of Flesh
Passion
Skin Song
Whose House is This?
House of a thousand Doors
Hotel Alexandria
Sidi Syed's Architecture
Tangled Roots
Poem by the Wellside
Bobating
Her Garden
Erupting Words
Aunt Chinna
Coda from Night-Scene

Translating Violence

Bordering Ourselves
Her Mother's Words
Ashtamudi Lake
Translating Violence
Desert Rose
Estrangement Becomes the Mark of the Eagle
Accidental Markings
Great Brown River
The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts

Making Up Memory

That Other Body
'A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse...'
New World Aria
No Nation Woman
White Horseman Blues
Migrant Music
A Durable Past
Performing the Word
For Safdar Hashmi Beaten to death Just Outside Delhi
Moloyashree
Making Up Memory
Brief Chronicle by Candlelight
San Andreas Fault
The Shock of Arrival
Paper Filled with Light
Skins with Fire Inside: Indian Women Writers

Fracturing the Iconic Feminine
In Search of Sarojini Naidu

Coda

Theater of Sense
Aftermath: Title Search
Well Jumped Women

From inside the book

Contents

OVERTURE
1
TRANSLATING VIOLENCE
63
MAKING UP MEMORY
111
iii
123
INDIAN WOMEN WRITERS
169
CODA
193
Notes
209
Index
217
71
222
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Meena Alexander was born Mary Elizabeth Alexander in Allahabad, India on February 17, 1951. She received a bachelor's degree in English and French at the University of Khartoum in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English at the University of Nottingham in 1973. She taught at the University of Delhi, the University of Hyderabad, Fordham University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Hunter College. She wrote numerous volumes of poetry, two novels, and a memoir entitled Fault Lines. Her collections of poetry included Stone Roots, House of a Thousand Doors, Illiterate Heart, Poetics of Dislocation, Birthplace with Buried Stones, and Atmospheric Embroidery. Her novels included Nampally Road and Manhattan Music. She died from endometrial serous cancer on November 21, 2018 at the age of 67.

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